It's sunny and a little warmer this first day of March, but the goldfish pond in the garden next door is still frozen. Every time I walk past the fish pond I stop to say hi, but I fear in the cold weather I've been saying hi to dead fish, frozen solid in the shallow ceramic basin.
For some reason my brain keeps insisting those fish are alive down there. I know the ice on top of a lake actually warms the water beneath, allowing the fish to survive, but this pond is far too shallow to behave that way. Maybe I believe the taxi driver in The Catcher in the Rye, who claimed that fish live frozen under the pond in Central Park while kids skate over the ice. Maybe the science fiction writer in me is plotting cryogenic fish survival. But by now I've read enough practical gardening posts to know those fish are dead.
To cheer myself up, I did a little research on frogs- turns out certain frogs can survive being frozen. The wood frog buries itself underground or undercover of leaves during cold spells. Its body temperature drops below 32 degrees Fahrenheit. Ice crystals form in its blood, portions of its body begin to freeze, and if it keeps on getting colder and colder, the frog freezes solid. In an article from the Seattle Times, professor Ken Storey says the frog is frozen so solid it "makes a thud" when dropped. But hours after warming back up, the frog's heart begins to beat and it hops on its merry way, unharmed.
Sure enough, the wood frog has evolved with its own system of cryogenics, what the article calls "natural antifreeze" made of glucose (frogs go on a starch-eating binge when cold weather approaches). The scientists interviewed weren't ready to say the frogs held the key to freezing humans for future generations. What they did hope to learn was a method to cryogenicaly freeze human organs for use in organ transplant and organ donation. Studying these funny little frogs could take the nightmare out of organ waiting lists and save lives.
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