The South American horned frog is a sit-and-wait predator. It huddles close to the ground or partly buried, well camouflaged, and waits until a juicy cricket or other prey wanders too close.

Then it shoots out its tongue, slapping the unsuspecting prey with the sticky underside, and pulling the insect — or sometimes, for large frogs, the lizard, other frog or mouse — back into its wide-open maw, all in milliseconds.

Thomas Kleinteich of Kiel University in Germany decided that the amphibian, also known as the Pac-Man frog, was ideal for an experiment he had in mind to test the adhesive strength of a frog tongue. “They eat a lot and they don’t move a lot,” he said.

So Dr. Kleinteich and his colleague Stanislav N. Gorb set up a mechanism to trick the frog into striking out at a force-measuring device. They discovered that crickets and lizards scarcely posed a challenge for the sturdy frog: Its tongue can pull in more than its entire body weight.