Who’s prepared to be a friend to frogs?
● Humanity’s ambivalence towards frogs has been traced as far back as the Roman empire, and new research has found it’s still thriving in urban Cape Town.
“Frogs are loved and loathed,” said urban ecologist Peta Brom, who headed into the suburbs around her lab at the University of Cape Town to find out how residents felt about the amphibians that might be living in their gardens.
Comments ranged from “cute” to “gross”, but the most striking finding was about culture: two-thirds of Xhosa speakers disliked frogs, compared with just 6% of English speakers. “Why do you want to know that? Everybody hates frogs,” one exclaimed.
Reporting her findings this week in the journal PLOS One, Brom said some of the Xhosa speakers were so phobic they refused to look at pictures on her frog flash cards.
Some “reported a belief that individual frogs found on their property out of the rainy season were sent by witchcraft as a curse”, she said. “The remedy is to kill the frog, preferably by sprinkling salt on its back, then sweeping up the body.”
People’s attitudes to frogs, and the cultural norms that shape them, are of more than mere academic interest, Brom told the Sunday Times.
“Globally, amphibians are the most threatened class of animals,” she said, blaming habitat disruption, climate change, rising ultraviolet radiation and viral and fungal diseases.
International research has shown that cities can be biodiversity hot spots, and with the largest proportion of Cape Town land used for single residential plots, the role of gardens in saving frogs could be crucial, said Brom.
That was why she set out to understand people’s attitudes — the first step in persuading householders to welcome the amphibians into their gardens and even encourage them to cultivate the dense undergrowth frogs love.
Brom’s research, part of her master’s studies at UCT, revealed that people who were discouraged from going near frogs in early childhood retained their fear as adults.
She found that people who liked frogs — including 22% of the Xhosa speakers among her 192 respondents — knew more about them. But she said more research is needed to determine whether fondness preceded curiosity, or vice versa.
After showing photographs of four different frogs to the research subjects, Brom said it was clear all frogs are not created equal when it comes to popularity among humans. The tiny arum reed frog, with a smooth skin and large eyes, was described as “likeable” by 77% of people, while the warty and bloated rain frog scored only 32%.