Many animals acquire remarkable survival skills, and pretending to be dead is the trick female European common frogs have adopted as a defence against excessive male attention during mating season, according to a new study.

Rana temporaria have been observed to use this behaviour called tonic immobility, the study, published in Royal Society Open Science, adds.

Tonic immobility is a rare but very successful strategy to avoid risky mating actions, such as several males clinging to a single female at the same time. Female frogs become motionless and imitate death to elude insistent males.

Researchers studying these frogs in their natural habitat observed that dozens of males compete for a partner in crowded breeding ponds, frequently resulting in ‘mating balls’—clusters of males clinging

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