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This blog post from The Grass Foundation highlights 2024 Grass Fellow Andrea “Dre” Gaede, who researched how gliding versus non-gliding arboreal frogs process visual information during flight at the Marine Biological Laboratory in summer 2024.

There are over 7,000 described species of frogs, and they live in a wide variety of habitats. Some spend nearly their entire lives in the trees, and among those tree frogs, a few have evolved specialized features for gliding or parachuting between branches.

For scientists like 2024 Grass Fellow Andrea “Dre” Gaede, gliding tree frogs present a rare opportunity to understand how neural systems evolved for the unique challenge of “flying” up to 50 feet between dense trees, even at night. How do their neural systems compare to tree frogs that don’t glide, and how different are they from more sedentary, earth-bound frogs?

Gaede, a lecturer in locomotor biomechanics at the University of London’s Royal Veterinary College, did her postdoctoral research on the visual control of flight in hummingbirds. She applied her experience and skills to ask similar questions about gliding tree frogs: What are the mechanisms and limitations of their visual motion processing? How do they make the split-second decisions required to successfully get from here to there without crashing? What can this tell us about the evolution of neural systems?

Source: How Gliding Tree Frogs See the World | The Grass Foundation Blog