Getting the blues: a rant.

 Harvey Tweats and Tom Whitehurst are a pair of enterprising teenagers from Staffordshire in England. They have set up a company breeding rare amphibians and reptiles with the aim of reintroducing them into the countryside.

I'll let The Telegraph newspaper take up the account of what happened when the young men tried a new method inducing moor frogs, aka Rana avalis, to breed.

They created a breeding enclosure in a plasterer's bath, and played sounds of males mating so they felt like they were surrounded by rivals, and turned bright blue.

I'm naturally full of admiration for the dedication, empathy, and scientific rigor displayed by these two young men; they are apparently the first people ever to persuade the moor frog to turn fully blue in captivity.

But I do hope the colour faded before Harvey and Tom had to go back to college.

photo credit: CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=704007

Word To Use Today: blue. Yes, this word does come from the French word bleu. It's really a Germanic word, though, and way back it is connected as well to the Latin word flāvus which means, of course, yellow.