A frog in India has a mushroom sprouting out of it. Researchers have never seen anything like it

A golden-backed frog was discovered with a tiny mushroom growing out of its flank, leaving scientists to question what might be the cause for the unique fungal growth.

When observing a hoard of golden-backed frogs at a roadside pond in Karnataka, India, a group of naturalists noticed something odd about one of the amphibians — the animal had a tiny mushroom sprouting out of its side. How the seemingly healthy frog came to grow its fungi companion — an occurrence that’s never been documented before — has left scientists baffled, according to a note published in January in the journal Reptiles and Amphibians. “When I first observed the frog with the mushroom, I was amazed and intrigued by the sight,” said Lohit Y T, a rivers and wetlands specialist with World Wildlife Fund-India in Bengaluru, via email. Y T was a part of the group that discovered the frog. “My thought was to document it, as this phenomenon is something we have never heard of. We just wanted this to be a rare incident and not a dangerous phenomenon for the frog.” The species — known as Rao’s intermediate golden-backed frog, or the scientific name Hylarana intermedia — is found in abundance in the southwestern Indian states of Karnataka and Kerala. The frogs are small, growing to be only up to 2.9 inches (7.4 centimeters) in length. As the naturalists watched the frog with the fungal growth, the animal moved from the center of the twig it sat upon to the very tip, turning around and changing positions, but the mushroom remained perfectly in place, Y T said. The group did not touch the frog. The authors discovered the amphibian in June 2023 and did not collect it, so neither the cause of the phenomenon nor the fate of the frog is known.