The frogs react with an ovulation process to the injection of the human chorionic gonadotropin hormone.
Today, find out if a person is pregnant or not It is very simple. You urinate into a small device, wait a few minutes… and voila, you have the results. Like all technological advances (especially those related to health), this system has become deeply rooted in our society since it is reliable in most cases, it is cheap and easy to mass produce. However, it has not always been that simple.
In the period covered between 1930 and 1960 A curious method to confirm pregnancies was popularized in Europe and the United States, whose ingredients were the urine of the person in question… and an African frog. The African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis) was our pregnancy test more than 60 years ago, since reacted very obviously to hormones produced by pregnant women from first weeks of pregnancy. The procedure seems typical of a shamanic ritualbut the results were true and accurate in the vast majority of cases.
When a person becomes pregnant, they begin to produce a hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG)what is present in blood and urine throughout the gestation period. Just like according to the US National Institute of Health., one of the gynecological interventions of the time (beginning with experiments in 1930) to determine whether or not there was pregnancy was to inject a urine sample into the dorsal lymphatic sac of one of these frogs. And voila, the process is already underway. The frog was the animal that offered the best results, but tests were also made with other amphibians, rats and even rabbits.
The hormone triggers the ovulation process of the frog, which ends up laying eggs.
The hormone generated by humans during pregnancy directly affects the ovulation process of frogsand encourages them to lay eggs in a range of 8 to 12 hours. Once the injection is done, the behavior of the frog is observed for a little more than half a day and changes in your metabolism are studied. If she lays eggs pregnancy is confirmedIf not, the possibility is ruled out.
Current pregnancy tests work exactly the same, but without frogs involved. what they do is measure hCG levels and display one or two bars depending on the result. Obviously these methods with African frogs are now obsolete, but the results left by the tests with amphibians proved to have a very high effectiveness during those decades. The big problem is that these tests they were quite expensiveand in many cases they meant the death of the animals that underwent the procedure.