Why can you boil a frog without it jumping out to safety if you raise the temperature slowly?
Category: Biology Published: December 8, 2012
By: Christopher S. Baird, author of The Top 50 Science Questions with Surprising Answers and Assistant Professor of Physics at West Texas A&M University
No matter how slowly you raise the temperature, a frog will attempt to jump to safety when it becomes uncomfortably hot. (If the water is already boiling when you throw the frog in, he will die before he has a chance to jump.) According to the business magazine "Fast Company", which interviewed several scientists and did its own experiment, frogs leap out of pots of hot water no matter how slowly you raise the temperature. This myth perhaps has persisted over the years because it seems plausible (frogs are cold blooded so they experience temperature differently than humans), and it teaches the moral that small dangers can be more problematic in the long run than big dangers because we can't perceive them as well.