GoKawiilBillie Goolsby (right) and Lauren O’Connell study parent–offspring communication in frogs.Credit: Zach Reddy
Working scientist profiles This article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests.
When the tadpoles of some poison frogs talk to their parents, they don’t croak or sing. Instead, they speak in a language of vibration, performing a wriggling dance against their mother’s or father’s body. The parents somehow judge their offspring’s hunger from this vibration.
Scientists don’t yet know exactly how the tadpole vibrations translate into parental marching orders. But when Billie Goolsby started her PhD research at Stanford University in California in 2020, she felt uniquely equipped to investigate the question. Goolsby was born hard of hearing, and her mother spoke to her using a language that, like the amphibians’ communication, included touch.
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“Parent–offspring communication is often the most crucial and the primary interaction that social creatures have,” Goolsby says. “Parents really care about what their babies say.”
The various species of poison frog that Goolsby’s PhD adviser, Lauren O’Connell, studies in the laboratory care for their young in ways that might seem surprising. In many species, fathers give their newly hatched tadpoles piggybacks to pools of water, such as rainwater cupped in a leaf. A mimic poison frog (Ranitomeya imitator) father puts each of its 2–4 tadpoles in a separate pool and patrols the pools daily. If he stands in the water and feels a tadpole vibrating, he sings relentlessly to his mate until she comes to join him. The mother feels the tadpole’s jiggling for herself and decides whether she needs to lay an unfertilized egg for it to eat.
To try to decode a family’s conversation, Goolsby teamed up with Stanford engineers and built a one-of-a-kind robot that mimics a tadpole’s vibrations. Her project has begun to unlock the secrets of an amphibian language — and has also transformed how the scientists around her collaborate and communicate.
Goolsby calls her schoolteacher mother “a superhero”. When Goolsby was growing up, her mum worked out ways to communicate with her, such as using touch to guide her through a noisy crowd. She taught Goolsby to enunciate words by paying attention to how the sounds felt in her mouth. “Touch, to me, is much more salient” than it is to other people, Goolsby says.
When she moved from her small secondary school in Georgia to Boston University in Massachusetts, Goolsby struggled in the large lecture classes. “I told my chemistry professor that I was hard of hearing, but I really wanted to stay in science,” she recalls. “And he said to me, ‘people like you don’t stay in science or medicine’.”
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