Of the seven amplexus modes (positions in which frogs mate), these frogs are found breeding in inguinal amplexus, where the male clasps the female in front of the female's back legs until eggs are laid, and the male fertilizes the egg mass with the release of sperm.

Although lacking a vocal sac, the males make a mating call of alternating long and short trills, by contracting the intrinsic laryngeal muscles.

Females also answer vocally, signaling either acceptance (a rapping sound) or rejection (slow ticking) of the male.

[8][9] This frog has smooth, slippery skin which is multicolored on its back with blotches of olive gray or brown.

Both males and females have a cloaca, which is a chamber through which digestive and urinary wastes pass and through which the reproductive systems also empty.

Feral clawed frogs in South Wales have been found to travel up to 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) between locations.

Clawed frogs are carnivores and will eat both living and dead prey, including fish, tadpoles, crustaceans, annelids, arthropods, and more.

However, clawed frogs can still see using their eyes and will stalk prey or watch predators by sticking their heads out of the water.

If not feeding, clawed frogs will just sit motionless on top of the substrate or floating, legs splayed below, at the water’s surface with their nostrils and eyes sticking out.

[18] This finding suggests that, during their evolutionary divergence, patterns of epigenetic changes in neural-development genes during aging have been conserved between frogs and mammals C.[18] In the wild, X. laevis are native to wetlands, ponds, and lakes across arid/semiarid regions of Sub-Saharan Africa.

The people of the sub-Saharan are generally very familiar with this frog, and some cultures use it as a source of protein, an aphrodisiac, or as fertility medicine.

[21] African clawed frogs in the wild are found at higher densities in artificial water bodies, such as ponds, dams and irrigation canals, rather than in natural lagoons or streams or rivers.

[23][24][25] This animal is widely used because of its powerful combination of experimental tractability and close evolutionary relationship with humans, at least compared to many model organisms.

In the 1930s, two South African researchers, Hillel Shapiro and Harry Zwarenstein,[26] students of Lancelot Hogben at the University of Cape Town, discovered that the urine from pregnant women would induce oocyte production in X. laevis within 8–12 hours of injection.

[28] In the late 1940s, Carlos Galli Mainini[29] found in separate studies that male specimens of Xenopus and Bufo could be used to indicate pregnancy[30] Today, commercially available hCG is injected into Xenopus males and females to induce mating behavior and to breed these frogs in captivity at any time of the year.

[31] Xenopus has long been an important tool for in vivo studies in molecular, cell, and developmental biology of vertebrate animals.

A related species, Xenopus tropicalis, is considered a more viable model for genetics, although gene editing protocols have now been perfected for.

By injecting DNA or mRNA into the oocyte or developing embryo, scientists can study the protein products in a controlled system.

[34] The first vertebrate ever to be cloned was an African clawed frog in 1962,[35] an experiment for which Sir John Gurdon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012 "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent".

The work rapidly expanded to include de novo reconstruction of X. laevis transcripts, in collaboration with groups around the world donating Illumina Hi-Seq RNA sequencing datasets.

Genome sequencing by the Rokhsar and Harland groups (UC Berkeley) and by Taira and collaborators (University of Tokyo, Japan) gave a major boost to the project, which, with additional contributions from investigators in the Netherlands, Korea, Canada and Australia, led to publication of the genome sequence and its characterization in 2016.

Identifiable differences are: African clawed frogs are voracious predators and easily adapt to many habitats.

Due to incidents in which these frogs were released and allowed to escape into the wild, African clawed frogs are illegal to own, transport or sell without a permit in the following US states: Arizona, California, Kentucky, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia, Hawaii,[51] Nevada, and Washington state.

[54] In Yunnan, China, there is a population of albino clawed frogs in Lake Kunming, along with another invasive: the American bullfrog.

[55] The African clawed frog may be an important vector and the initial source of Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, a chytrid fungus that has been implicated in the drastic decline in amphibian populations in many parts of the world.