Trials are a'running!

Hi all!

I've run 4 total nights of trials and here's the breakdown so far:

- I am testing 10 cane toads right now, 5 each night (which is 5 hours total of video recording!)
- Of my 10 toads, 5 have food in their arena bowls ('food' treatment) and 5 do not ('control' treatment)
- Every toad that has the 'food' treatment ate on the first night (YAY!). For those of you who read about my research, this means that each toad only has to go through 6 total trials (equals 12 nights of work).

That doesn't seem like a whole lot, but it is 6 1/2 hours of experiments a night (5 hours of trials + setup, breakdown, and switching between toads), and at least 6 hours of video analysis every day. That's right; 12 days straight of 12+ hours days. Eeeep!

But so far, it's been worth it. Here's a picture of what the arena looks like finished:

I had to extend the walls up about 1.5 feet in order for the toads not to be able to jump out. Lesson learned in the lab - it's always good to try it out first, before you actually get to the field! Here's a picture of the inside:

Note that you can't see any of the leaf litter that we spent hours tearing up. :( oh well, at least the dirt works well. Finally, here's a picture of the PVC contraption at the top that holds the camera and the 4 infrared lights (one at each corner):

Pretty groovy, huh? It's like a giant K'nex set - the whole arena is made up of 1 or 2 foot segments of PVC that all fit together, so it can be broken down and packed up when I'm not using it. 

I don't have enough data yet to show you much, so I'll leave you with a toadily awesome photo shoot:

Me and a large female toad. :)

Large female toad by herself. She was not pleased (I woke her up to take the photos!)

My milk frog brings and the (fe)males to the yard...

Tonight we start cane toad trials - so excited! I am hoping that the toads will be hungry enough to visit more than one or two food bowls (which is what they did in Lubbock). We'll see what happens. I'll report back in a few days, when both groups have gone and I have a general idea of what's going on.

Now, however, I'd like to tell you a little story about an unexpected visitor to our house last week:

Who is this little guy? I'll give you a hint - he's about the size of a Gladiator Tree Frog (which is what we thought he was at first). Upon further inspection, we found that he had interesting toad-like bumps all over his skin:

AND he was very, very sticky. Did you guess the milk frog, Trachycephalus venulosus? Then you're right! Este es la rana favorita de Ximena (Ximena's favorite frog), so she was very excited to see it, since it's actually not very common in Gamboa. What luck, he was sitting right under our house at the meeting table, just waiting for us to take pictures of him! As he was being handed around the group so we could all feel his sticky skin, he leaped from my hand onto Ximena's shirt (sadly, no picture), and splashed milky secretion into my eye! At first I thought it was fine, but after a few minutes my eye started to itch and burn really bad. I could still see, so I  said "Ummm, I think I got splashed in the eye....", walked calmly over to the sink, and began flushing my eye out with water. The calm, quick reaction paid off, and as the night progressed my eye stopped burning and was OK. Lesson learned: always watch out for your eyes, mouth, and nose; you never know what might splash off of something!!

Have you every gotten something weird in your eye? What did you do? Did you panic, or react calmly?

Hoppity hop hop - hop tests!

So I ran into a slight dilemma when I got to Panama. Actually, we (my committee and I) knew this would be a dilemma, but I couldn't do anything about it until I got here. You see, the problem with comparing exploration and learn between two species is that, well, they're two different species! Nothing is really the same for either the Cane toads or the Leaf litter toads; they're different sizes, they eat different things, they live in different habitats... and they move at different rates. So naturally, the testing arena for the smaller leaf litter toads should be smaller than the testing arena for the cane toads. Right? Most people would agree with me, but then the question arises; how much smaller?

At first, I scaled the leaf litter toad arena down by body size. Leaf litter toads are about 1/3 of the size of cane toads (on average), so the arena should be 1/3 the size. Makes sense, right? Well, this is what that would actually mean:

Seems a little...... little. I mean really, 32 inches across? That's less that 3 feet! The leaf litter toads are small, but they aren't that small. So the only thing to do was come down here, catch a few, and see how fast they move. Enter: the idea of the hop test!

To scale the arena accurately, we have to look not just at body size, but at overall range of mobility (i.e. how far can the toads move in a single hop or jump?). To do this, I'll take 5 toads of each species, put them in an empty arena for 10 minutes, and measure their hop and jump length. Sounds tricky, right? Well, it would be, except that we have an A-maze-ing program called Ethovision, which will follow the toads and take all sorts of measurements for us! So far, I've measured 3 cane toads and 2 leaf litter toads so far, and I've got a few more to do before I can make any conclusions. 

Given that the leaf litter toads are 1/3 of the size of the cane toads, what would you predict their range of movement to look like? Would you predict that they would move more or less than the cane toads? Which toad species do you think can hop the farthest? Jump the farthest?

Check back to see if your predictions are right! :)

Progress: Website is LIVE, arena is coming along!

Hi Folks!

In case you're reading this blog and haven't seen the main show, my website Adventures in Toading is finally up and running! Check it out for more information about my research and about the frogs and toads of Panama.

I've been working on getting my arena set up and moving the toads to our new workspace. Here's a picture of what it looks like right now:

And here are the toads, happy in their new home under the stairs:

 I've still go a lot to do - including rip up a huge pile of leaf littter to put in the arena for substrate:

Ok, back to work - hast lluego!

Website is *almost* done!

Hi folks!

Sorry, I've been fairly absent from my blog - we've been in Panama for 3 days, and I have yet to write anything substantial. We've had a lot of luck, but most of my down time has been invested in getting the rest of the website up and running, so you'll have to forgive me! I'll write about the first few days soon; tomorrow we are going into the city for supplies and mealworms for the toads - yum!

For now, I'll tell you this much: although it hasn't really rained yet (we're at the very beginning of the rainy season here), we've had some great luck catching frogs and toads. I've got 9 out of 10 toads that I need to begin the first set of experiments, and we've seen tons of tree frogs calling. Here are some of my favorite pictures from our first few nights in the field:

Check out the newest section of my site, Frog Calls of Gamboa, and see if you can identify these frogs!

Scouting for Toads in Panama

We arrived in Panama early Friday morning, around 2am. We decided to stay in the city that night, and drive out to Gamboa (about an hour away) in the afternoon. Friday night we spent time looking for cane toads and other frogs, and introducing Sally, our new field assistant, to Panamanian wildlife. I was able to find 2 toads that were the right size for me - I've got them in plastic containers under the staircase, and am going out to find more tonight!

I'll post pictures tomorrow or the next day, along with the welcome video for the website. For now, I need to go and get ready for more fieldwork! :)

Has it rained where you live lately? Have you heard any frogs calling?

Back in action and bigger than ever!

Hi everybody!

So, I'm sure you're pretty peeved at me for leave off in the middle of last summer.... I can explain, really. You see, I stopped writing because, well, things got boring. I hate to say it, but it's true. We figured out the good stuff, tried to set up a quick experiment to start (and finish) in the last 2 weeks, and it kind of snuffed itself out due to some strange confounding factors. Basically, we let the 5 original toads go, got 10 new ones, and started over to get some real data.... but the toads didn't want to eat! They totally snubbed the dog food, and only one or two of them even ate in their cages. Sigh. It just goes to show, sometimes science doesn't happen the way you think it should. Fieldwork is so unpredictable, you have to just be ready to go with whatever works at the time. I came back to the USA with some great ideas, but no real, conclusive data. But that's OK, because it was GREAT setup for what I'll be doing this summer.

Which brings us to now! I'm heading back down to Gamboa in a week, and I'll be spending 2 months this time - with LOTS of updates and pictures! Over the past 10 months, I've been planning and planning, scouring the literature and creating mock setups, and I'm ready to hit the ground running and get some stuff done! Regular posts will start in about a week, and I'm not going to commit to every day, but you should see/hear from me at least 2-3 times a week for the remainder of the summer.

So stay tuned, because whatever ends up happening, it's going to be AWESOME, and I'm going to share it all along the way! :)