Saying “I’m sorry, I’m not interested.” Saying you have a boyfriend. Actually having a boyfriend. Saying you’re gay. Actually being gay. Saying “I think you’re disgusting and I’d rather eat glass than speak to you for another second”. Avoiding eye contact. Completely ignoring him. Giving him a fake number. Getting your friend to call you in hysterics and pretend that their cat just died. Acting feral. Barking.

These are just some of the ways women try to avoid unwanted male attention – and as any woman will tell you, it’s often amazing how remarkably persistent men can be.

Apparently, female frogs experience the same sorts of issues, and new research has found that they’ve resorted to an extremely innovative way of getting men to fuck off: pretending to be dead.

Researchers say the findings shed new light on the European common frog, which suggests that lady frogs do not simply ‘put up with’ horny male frogs, who occasionally kill females in situations where several males end up clinging onto one female and accidentally crushing or drowning her. 

“It was previously thought that females were unable to choose or defend themselves against this male coercion,” said Dr Carolin Dittrich, the lead author of the study from the Natural History Museum of Berlin. But, Dittrich says, her research has shown that “females in these dense breeding aggregations are not passive as previously thought.”

Dittrich initially planned on researching whether male frogs have any preference when it comes to the female’s body size (can these lady frogs catch a break???), and began her research by placing one male frog in a box with two females, one large and one small.

Speaking to the New York Times, Dittrich said that it turns out male frogs “are really not choosy at all [...] They grab whatever they can”. But while observing the frogs, she noticed something unusual which piqued her interest. Dittrich spotted one male attempting to mate with one of the females, who looked stiff and immobile. Dittrich’s immediate assumption was that the female had died – but after the male lost interest and began pursuing the other female, the ‘dead’ frog appeared to come back to life.

Dittrich’s research found that around one-third of females faked death when a male grabbed them. This is a tactic known as ‘tonic immobility’, and has been observed in other species of animal including rabbits, sharks, and possums – although it’s usually used to avoid being eaten by a predator. “We don’t know if it’s a conscious decision to play dead,” Dittrich said, adding that it could also be a reaction triggered by stress.

Dittrich also found that more than 80 per cent of females rolled in the water to shake off unwanted advances, while nearly half of them made “grunting sounds” which imitated the noise made by a male frog accidentally grabbed by another male.

These tactics – playing dead, rolling over, and pretending to be a man – did have some success: out of 54 females grabbed by a male, 25 managed to shake him off, suggesting that female frogs aren’t totally defenceless when it comes to avoiding unwanted male attention. This is all well and good, but I would encourage male frogs to think carefully about their own behaviour, unlearn their unconscious gender biases, and hold their friends accountable for assaulting female frogs too.

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