07-014

WHEN WALKING FROGS ATTACK

 

            As a practical matter, I seldom trouble myself with small things, except within these confines.   Life is too abrupt to spend an inordinate amount of effort examining trifles unless there's a handsome recompense in it.  Otherwise, I turn my daily concerns to grander designs, as if the world needed one less pundit avoiding the inconsequential.  Plus, I enjoy being paid.  It's always been the best solution for keeping out of debt.

 

            I'm referring, of course, to us (and by us I mean "species.")  Yes, like it or not, we are only one of many roaming about making more and less of ourselves.  We're no more or less important than our co-inhabitors, though our hostile actions against some of them often belie this, and I wholly agree with the practice.  The day I find myself feeling subordinate to Golden Poison Dart Frogs (one of them could quickly dispatch 100 of us with a single drop of their perspiration) is the day I'll approach them for counsel on reducing my accounts payable.

 

            Moreover, before I examined these trivialities, I hadn't known that frogs sweat, poisonously or not.  This gives them an unfair advantage over us.  Due to their placement in or near watery habitats, one always expects them to be glistening.  I wouldn't trust any arid-affected frog, and I don't recall ever seeing one.

 

            I only wish I could say the same for our species.  There was once a large, amphibian-shaped woman at the community pool who always seemed to emerge dry from the deep end.  My support for The Darwinian Theory, as well as my rebuking her advances toward me, probably began there.  It certainly confined me to the kiddy-end shallows, and forever put me off using swimming as anything other than a means for not drowning.

 

            The 100-to-1 kill ratio, however, in a worst case global scenario of killer frogs versus humans, should it ever come to that, now demands that I elevate these comments from the merely informative worthy of only an oblique browse of the op/ed Sunday supplements, to those we would deem vital to our existence:  Stop reading here, and you might die.

 

            Alright, then.  Your continued presence tells me that of all the things you'd rather avoid being today, snuffed out by a frog isn't the least of them.

 

            The researching chroniclers of our fellow warrior-foe species: "phyllobates terribilis," fail to inform us on the full scope & practice of its deadly toxin transmissions, though they do allow that it's possible for you and me to succumb from "even touching a paper towel that a Golden Poison Dart Frog has walked upon."  This should've tipped them off.

 

            A walking frog is never a good sign.

 

            Still, I'm determined to leave you something notable for its lack of noteworthiness.  Know this:

 

            Somewhere in the annals of comparative species chronology, at least one of a hundred eager herpetologists was once done-in by ignoring the obvious dangers of a suspect frog walking away from a sweaty paper towel.

 

            No small thing, but I want it to be.