A rare act involving the South American Tree Frog and several species of tree-dwelling simians in the South American jungles. By inserting some portion of its body, usually the prehensile tail or its phallus (this is dependant, to an extent, on the gender of the simian), into the mouth cavity of the frog, the monkey
simultaneously demonstrates its dominance as well as its acceptance of its amphibian neighbor. The completion of this conjugal act is crucial to continuation of this
odd symbiotic
relationship, as the tree frogs will remove harmful insects from the monkey's environment and the monkey will act to distract or eliminate possible predators.
The act, first reported in 1892, is named in honor of Sir Curtis Matthews Froat, who provided a detail account of frog-simian relations in a report to the Royal
Geographical Society follow his five year expedition to the Peruvian Amazon.
Today, the term is used in popular culture to discribe a dominant symbiotic
relationship, wherein both participants derive a benefit, but one of parties clearly controls the nature and extent of the partnership. It is working it way into urban dialect, as it is being used in Chicago and Atlanta to depict pimp-whore, dealer-user, kingpin-dealer, and rapper-poser interactions.
