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This is Ethel. She lives in a little pond outside our kitchen. She's a green frog. She's about 2 to 2.5 inches (5 - 6.5 cm) long, about double that with her legs outstretched. According to every metric I can find, she's a little girl. Her color is dark, her tympanium is the same size as her eye, she doesn't have knobs on her "hands", she has a white belly, and she likes Abba tunes. (I made that last part up, but she does hum along when I'm listening to Fernando or Dancing Queen.) Frogs are fascinating little creatures. They have a lung, but they don't have a diaphram. They breath by moving the membrane below their jaw. They can get oxygen through their skin though, but only when they're wet, so if they're in oxygenated water, they don't need to breathe. They're cold blooded, and green frogs can survive being frozen in the winter, as long as they're not frozen too hard. -20 deg F (-29 deg C) is about their limit. They shelter in protected places in order to avoid the worst of it.
Bees have saddle bags! Who Knew? This bumblebee is demonstrating how she carries her payload back to the hive. That little orange hoob is a tiny packet of pollen and nectar. It's attached to the hairs on her legs, and it will stay in place through some pretty impressive G forces, much stronger than she will ever encounter in flight. As you would expect, there's one just like it on the other side. The saddle bags can weigh as much as 30 percent of the weight of the bee, according to Katherine Kornei in Science Magazine - http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/honey-bees-fill-saddlebags-pollen-here-s-how-they-keep-them-gripped-tight.
Be still in your heart and filled with wonder. Be beautiful like the grass and spoil not the beauty which surrounds you. As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. Psalm 103:15-16
