What If Large Amphibious Frogs Covered All Of The World
- Ian Hacker
- Jul 20, 2017
- 4 min read

What would you do if you woke up one morning, and the world was covered in large amphibious frogs. Every single inch of it, from the surface of the ocean, to the tops of buildings, down to the lowest valley. These frogs are big, 22 meters long, 10 meters wide, and 10 meters tall. They are not messing around. If one were to look at Earth from space, no longer would it be the blue green planet it is, instead dotted with red, yellow, blue, green, and brown. Now a lot of things would be squished by these frogs instantly, but what about everything that was left. Well if any movie makers were still their, maybe How To Train Your Frog, could be a leaping hit, but in reality I assume most of society would be gone, so no market. A lot of life would certainly be gone, but hey before all the frogs died of starvation, and if you were still alive, you could watch some awesome frogs jumping. I guess in the end it would just suck.
My "scientific" thoughts about if this happened:
-Around 2,318,500,000 Frogs of 22 meters long, by 10 meters wide, would be able to fit on the world (assuming all of Earths surface area is in use(510,070,000 km^2), is approximate because did not take into account possible affections by curvature, of a sphere, and natural formations on Earth)
-Of these 2,318,500,000 frogs the total is brought down to 672,365,000 frogs (Multiplied original number of frogs by .29) frogs because 71% of the Earth is covered in oceans, and any frog that spawned on the ocean would not be able to live in the salt water.
There are some frogs like the crab-eating frogs, african clawed frogs, and southern leopard frogs that can live in salt water, but we are not including them, because for them to actually stay alive they would have had to appear near the coast, and in a habitat they could live in once on land.
-Down to 672,365,000 frogs, but not all land habitats can support normal sized, let alone giant frogs. With these calculations I am saying that all of Earths deserts(Ie: all of Antartica, Sahara, and others), and urban areas would have mass giant Frog extinction. 33% of Earths land mass is desert and according to the Grump Mapping Project 3% of Earths land mass is urban areas(source). There is some overlap between desert, and urban areas (Ie: Las Vegas), and due to the fact that in some desert and urban areas, there's some habitable space for frogs we will use 34% of Earths land mass is immediately not habitable to these frogs. That leaves 430,313,600 giant frogs still alive.
-So we have very "scientifically" narrowed it down to 430,313,600 giant frogs. From here I chose the European Common Frog, because it is common, as a baseline with it averaging 9cm long for males, and 13cm for females. I'm guessitmating that it is around 5cm wide, based on pictures. Taking that half the frogs that spontaneously appear are female, and half male the average length is then 11cm. From here to scale an 11*5 cm Frog into a 22*10 meter frog it is scaled by a factor of 200.
-An adult European Common Frog can eat any invertebrate that is congruent size wise with its eating capabilities, but prefers to eat flies, slugs, snails, and worms. (Wikapedia) I could not find anywhere that stated exactly how much an adult Common Frog eats, but based off looking at a bunch of random Frog sites, I'm gonna say feed 4 times a week, eating the equivalent of 4 horse flies each time. That creates a weekly diet of 16 horse flies, which each weigh 12mg (Source). This is a total of 192 mg of meat a week.
-Now with the scaling of size by a factor of 200, and the scaling happening to its height, width, and length, this would mean a that the amount of energy needed would be 200*200*200 more, or 8 million times more energy.(Just a little foggy in my unit about does increased body size, mean equal increase in energy needed, so... at this point you can assume just a little off 100% accurate of what would happen) The issue that comes up here is that while it might eat 192mg of meet a week, I do not have access to what percent of the nutrients is carbohydrates, lipids, nucleic acids, or proteins. Therefore I will not be taking that into account. 192mg*8,000,000=1,536,000,000 mg. That is equivalent to a little more then 3,386 pounds.
-With this massive increase in energy demand, a new pray is needed, sorry bugs you can go lickity split, hopping home from your sticky situation at frog incorporated. The average adult cow weighs 1000-1800 pounds (Source). This would create a situation where each frog needs 3 full grown cows a week, and 1,290,940,800 (1.3 billion) cows a week for all 430,313,600 giant frogs. There is around 1.3-1.5 billion cows in the world (source), and with the 1.3 billion needed for feeding, this would effectively wipe out the cow population in a week, and that is assuming all of the cows are equal to an adult, which they are not.
-And now we end our journey, because all those Giant frogs would almost certainly die, due lack of adaptions to the environment, severe over competition, and the fact that their organs and bodies are not made to be 8 million times (200 cubed) their original size. But what did this bring us, well I thought it was kind of fun to write, so the lesson is oranges can sometimes create the most wonderful watermelon, but that watermelon does not need to be better then the orange. Or ideas are fun, doing them can be great, but can be less great then the idea. Or in reality I thought I had to create a quick one second justification for this hopping awesomeness above.
留言