Tom,
I saw that episode. The transcript is as follows:
" At a pond in Hamburg, in 2005, toads started exploding during the
mating season. Thousands of toads, swollen to three times their usual
size, crawled out of the water, making eerie screeching noises, and
went pop. Toad entrails were propelled up to a yard away.
The authorities feared toxic pollution, or a new “bird flu” style
health emergency, but when the “pond of death” was pumped into tankers
and analysed at laboratories, no clue was found. Exploding toads were
subsequently reported at other sites in Germany and Denmark.
One theory is that the pond was infected by a fungus or virus, brought
in by nearby racehorses. Another is that birds peck the livers from
living toads; the toads then puff up, which is their natural defence
mechanism against predator attack, and water enters the cavity in
their body through the wound, and thus they keep inflating until they
pop. (Two years previously, crowds of Hamburg crows had taken to
attacking humans en masse, without warning, in a local park.) "
Cheers,
Carl Clifford
On 01/02/2012, at 4:45 PM, Tom Tarrant wrote:
Did anyone see an episode of QI shown a couple of weeks back? Stephen
Fry
mentioned that there was a story of 'exploding' Common Toads (Bufo
bufo?)
in the UK, at the time no-one knew the cause but it turned out that
crows
had been doing something similar and 'extracting' their organs and in
doing
so they had induced the amphibians to inflate themselves and explode!
(well
I think that's how the story went:-))
Tom
On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Del Richards
<>wrote:
Over some years I have had a programme "Bird Talk Back" on ABC Far
North in Cairns. Yesterday (31/01/2012) I fielded ten calls in thirty
minutes.
Early in the programme a caller from Walkamin (between Mareeba and
Atherton) had found four dead cane toads with an small incision in
their
throat by her small backyard pond.
I told her plainly that it was a good mystery thinking that it
would be
animal attack rather than bird predation. About three calls later a
gent
from Gordonvale south of Cairns assured us that he had watched White-
tailed
Rats and (surprise, surprise!) Northern Brown Bandicoots kill and
eat the
non-toxic underside parts of cane toads.
Minutes later the mystery was solved when George who owned a
piggery at
Walkamin called in to tell us about Roufous Night Herons. He related
that
after an early evening storm one time he checked the piggery and
that a
night heron was moving through the pig pens and systematically
flipping
cane toads on their back and taking out their innards.
Given the shape and dexterity of their pointed bill the night heron
would be well able to extract the gut through a small incision. On
my next
programme I will endeavour to follow the thread on birds and cane
toads in
an effort to derive some more latent information that is held out
there by
everyday non-scientific observers.
Del. Richards, Fine Feather Tours, Mossman, NQ.
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Tom Tarrant
Kobble Creek, Qld
http://kobble.aviceda.org
http://picasaweb.google.com.au/aviceda/
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