The World's Smallest Frog can hear with its mouth, new study claims

Scientists have discovered that the one of the World's Smallest Frogs is able to hear through its mouth. The Gardiner's frog, which was originally assumed to be deaf, uses its mouth cavity to convey sound signals to its brain, according to the study; published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The tiny 1cm frogs, which live in the forests of the Seychelles, have no middle ear region at all and therefore no resonating eardrum. The discovery of the creatures ability to receive sound through its mouth solves the mystery of why the frog produces loud, high-pitched squeaks. For their research, scientists made recordings of the frogs' calls and played them back to wild frogs in order to observe their behavior. Speaking to the British Broadcasting Corporation, Justin Gerlach from the Nature Protection Trust of Seychelles said that the playback-experiments showed that the frogs were able to hear, saying: "If you play the call, they respond". He added: "Either they change position - they may move to face where the call is coming from - or quite often they will call in response".