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Biological Miracle – Wood Frog

(www.nps.gov)
501 points thunderbong | 4 comments | 15 Nov 24 18:16 UTC | HN request time: 0.855s | source
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pcthrowaway ◴[15 Nov 24 21:50 UTC] No.42151576[source]▶
Now I'm wondering all kinds of things about their brain. Are they capable of forming memories, and would they retain those memories after a freeze/thaw cycle?

Effectively they're dead when they freeze. I'm assuming there's no brain activity.. Which means when they thaw they're being restored to life. I wonder if any other animals experience this

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1. bobbylarrybobby ◴[15 Nov 24 23:13 UTC] No.42152366[source]▶
I would assume that just as a computer’s storage remains intact after a restart, these frogs’ brains have internal structure, synaptic connections etc that are preserved after a freeze/thaw cycle.
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2. kortilla ◴[16 Nov 24 03:35 UTC] No.42153930[source]▶
That’s a bad assumption though. Based on our inability to bring brains back to life it seems very likely the better comparison is volatile memory like RAM.
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3. MacsHeadroom ◴[16 Nov 24 03:53 UTC] No.42154006[source]▶
As discussed elsewhere in this thread, butterflies retain some memories formed as caterpillars after every cell in their body changes drastically. They never die but they change immensely and still retain memories, so I'm not sure we know enough to say what good and bad assumptions are here.

Also this should be relatively trivial to test.

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4. gus_massa ◴[16 Nov 24 11:50 UTC] No.42155934{3}[source]▶
The nervous system of caterpillars is not disolved during the transformation.