A horned frog's tongue has a pulling force three times the animal's own weight.
Researchers placed treats behind a glass slide that measured the force of the animal's tongue, the BBC reported.
"It's the first time we've ever measured how well frog tongues stick," said Doctor Thomas Kleinteich, who performed the experiments at the University of Kiel, told the BBC.
The team found the pulling forces were the strongest when the tongue hit the glass for a relatively short period of time, leaving behind very little mucus.
"The thing that's interesting about frog tongues is that they're really fast," Kleinteich said. "It only takes milliseconds."
The horned frog can slurp up prey as large as rodents. The adhesive on their tongues is about one-fifteenth the strength of a gecko, National Geographic reported.
"However, in terms of prey capture, frog tongue adhesive forces are enormous-on average 1.4 times their body weight," Kleinteich told National Geographic.
"Translated into human dimensions," he said, "that would be an 80-kilogram [176-pound] person lifting 112 kilograms [246 pounds] just by using his or her tongue. And they do this within milliseconds [of making contact."
In the wild these frogs hide half-buried in the ground and wait for unsuspecting prey to get too close, the BBC reported.
Many people the frog's mucus acts as a type of "superglue," but this might not be the case.
"It plays a role. It's definitely a wet adhesive system, it's not just structure and friction, because there is some fluid involved. But the key is the structure plus the mucus," Kleinteich told the BBC. "It's not like having a liquid glue, it's rather like a sticky tape."
The researchers are now examining these fascinating tongues with a microscope to gain more insight into how it works.
"It's fun," Kleinteich said. "I used to do a lot of morphological, descriptive work with amphibians - I used to study dead, museum specimens. For me it was quite exciting to work with the living frogs and see how they behave."
