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Mon 25 Apr, 2005 08:12 am
BERLIN (AFP) - Hundreds of toads have met a bizarre and sinister end in Germany in recent days, it was reported: they exploded.
According to reports from animal welfare workers and veterinarians as many as a thousand of the amphibians have perished after their bodies swelled to bursting point and their entrails were propelled for up to a metre (three feet).
It is like "a science fiction film", according to Werner Smolnik of a nature protection society in the northern city of Hamburg, where the phenomenon of the exploding toad has been observed.
"You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding."
He said the bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size.
"I have never seen such a thing," said veterinarian Otto Horst. So bad has the death toll been that the lake in the Altona district of Hamburg has been dubbed "the pond of death."
Access to it has been sealed off and every night a biologist visits it between 2:00 and 3:00 am, which appears to be peak time for batrachians to go bang.
Explanations include an unknown virus, a fungus that has infected the water, or crows, which in an echo of the Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Birds", attack the toads, literally scaring them to death.
I usually am. This is just making it worse.
Interesting sign they came up with. I guess they couldn't put picture of one that already exploded, but this doesn't seem to pictorally tell what the problem is very well.
Maybe someone put tums in the water and they reacted like gulls do when they eat the stuff.... (I've heard)?
Was my first thought, but even if that's not urban legend (I suspect they don't actually explode, just die), you'd have to feed the toads directly. Doesn't seem possible, as they've sealed off the pond and this stuff happens in the middle of the night...
You know, they have some new chewy rolaids. Do you think those could make frogs explode?
R-O-L-A-I-D-S
Rolaids makes the very best
Popping toads
Maybe it's some kind of Biblical thingy?
Hamburger toad explosions...Revelation 5:3
The outcome is most bizarre too....
The German newspaper Spiegel wrote, that scientists could
not find any contaminants of the waters, nor was there any
virus found in tissue samples of the dead toads.
A veterinary surgeon in Berlin finally found the answer: crows
are the culprits. They feed off the liver of toads and poke
tiny holes into their abdominal cavity. Toads inflate
themselves when in danger (or during mating season) and
with the liver missing and an additonal hole in their body,
the lung bursts while the body is inflated and the toads explode.
Since crows are intelligent birds and learn fast,
three to five crows easily can "open up" hundreds of toads
within a short time period.
Reminds me of the Hitchcock movie "The Birds".
What? The crows get their livers but they don't die?
How strange!
Yes sozobe, it all happens in one process: while the crows poke
out the toads liver, the toads fearfully inflate themselves and explode. That is, before the toads can inflate themselves, the crows have already picked off the liver.
This is just so interesting.
Crows are damn smart.
Oh good, Walter has found an english source
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