Researchers have uncovered a unique movement skill ‘fast-moving belly flops’ in cricket frogs, a species native to Virginia and North Carolina. This unique skill helps them to leap multiple times in succession on water. Their ‘skitter’ kills could perhaps bring insight to tools for the future of robotics, watercraft, and more.
Led by Jake Socha, the Samuel Herrick Professor in Mechanical Engineering, the researchers discovered the unique ability of the cricket frogs to ‘skitter’. Skittering means jumping multiple times in succession.
“Skittering is not actually a well-defined word for this behavior – one naturalist used it to describe a ‘jumping on water’ behavior in frogs in 1949, and since then, it’s been used for this type of locomotion in all the following literature. Part of this research is not only studying this behavior in cricket frogs, but to try and give ‘skittering’ a more precise, scientific definition,” Weiss said in a statement.
The researchers have published their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology.
While popular beliefs suggest that frogs cross the water without sinking, Socha’s team decided to investigate. They wanted to find out if the popular opinion was true, the frogs still require a highly specialized anatomy. So, what does the cricket frog have that others don’t?
“Our lab has studied a range of animals, and many exhibit fascinating behaviors in navigating their environment. The humble cricket frog lives nearby, and yet it still surprised us with its capabilities, further motivating our curiosity to understand the living world,” Socha adds.
Cricket frogs are one of the smallest frogs in North America. They can be placed easily on the thumb of an average adult’s hand.
To understand the movement of the cricket frogs, the team set up high-speed videography cameras that can capture up to 500 frames per second. To understand how the frog leaps on land as well as in the water, the team observed the frogs in a 20-gallon glass tank.

Socha’s team found that the frogs do sink with each jump. Though ‘skittering’ is considered as light leap across the water with only their feet touching the surface, the recordings revealed a different reality. They found that each time a frog came down from a leap, its entire body would submerge. The movement was less like a frog leaping and dancing across the water freely, and more like a plop and a jump. A more accurate description of their motion would be ‘porpoising’, just like a porpoise or dolphin leaps from beneath the water’s surface.

“It’s fascinating how easily we can be fooled by fast animal movements. Here, we’re fooled by a frog that appears like a skipping stone but is actually jumping and dunking multiple times in a row. Frogs are great jumpers, but most of them don’t exhibit this porpoising behavior, and we still don’t know why. Is there something special about the frog’s leap, or is it simply a matter of small body size?” Socha adds.
The cricket frogs’ jump cycle includes: