Swallow Your Food!

I'm about to start the next round of trials tonight, so I apologize for not writing something longer today. Because you're all such good readers and stopped by anyways, here are a few great pictures from the last two days:

This is definitely my favorite photo of the summer! We picked up this cane toad (in my left hand, farther away) earlier in the night, and of course didn't have anything to put him in. Later, we found this beautiful Goliath Tree Frog and I *really* needed to pick him up (hence the flashlight in my mouth). Notice the antennae sticking out? He just had a very yummy meal... :)

On Monday my advisor came back into town and brought Mason, one of my favorite undergrads! They are doing a separate project with the Leaf Litter Toads, and brought me 9 toads this morning. It was a bit of a shuffle, but I got everybody housed in their own containers and safely tucked away with food and water. These guys take a bit longer to start eating meal worms (about 7 days), so I wanted to get them all settled ASAP so I could start training them. 

These last two are pictures of the 'scaled down' arena for the little toads. Remember those hop tests we did way back in June? Well, it looks like the little toads' hop length is about half the size of the larger cane toads, and their jump length is about a third the size. We took the difference and made the arena 5/12 smaller (I know, it seems a little silly), which worked out to be a nice, even 40 inches across! 

I can't wait for these little toads to start eating so we can see what they'll do in the arena. OK, I'm off to start more cane toad trials! 

Analyzing the Videos: Drawing a Line in the Dirt

Once all of the arena zones are drawn, it's time to analyze the video in Ethovision. This is the easiest step by far. Simply put, I import the video into Ethovision, make sure that the detection setting are set so that the program recognizes the toad as the 'subject', and I click 'record'. Then I wait for an hour! :) The program is very cool, it traces the path of the toad and analyzes all sorts of information about it. Here's a picture of a path from a food toad's 1st trial in the arena:

And here's a picture of the path of the same toad during the 6th trial:

What kind of differences do you notice about the path that this toad took? Does it look like he visited any of the food bowls? Can you tell if he ate any of the food? 

After you make your predictions, watch the video of the 6th trial below. The trial is sped up to 10x the normal speed so you won't have to watch an hour of a toad exploring (like I do!). 

Getting Ready for Round #2!

Well, we're back from Bocas del Toro, which was a great adventure (though not entirely relaxing). It was very quiet and deserted because it is the off-season, meaning that tourists usually wait until the drier, "winter" months to visit. We enjoyed snorkeling and hanging out at the beach for a few days before returning to Gamboa.

Meanwhile, in Gamboa, We've collected 9 toads and are almost ready to start our second set of trials! On Sunday I'll continue the saga and write about more video analysis in Ethovision, and show you an example of one of the toad videos from this last set of trials.

Right now, I'd like to share an amazing website that I just found, Canopy in the Clouds. This website embodies everything I'd like to do with Adventures in Toading in the future; it's got tons of activities and lesson plans, a 3-D, interactive Cloud Forest, and information about the wildlife and ecosystems that you can find in the cloud forests of Central America. There's even a Spanish version of the page, which is something I hope to do with AIT by the end of the summer. :)

Buenas noches, y voy a escribir más en este domingo!
(Good night, and I'll write more this Sunday!)

Not only anteaters eat ants :)

We're heading to Bocas del Toro for a couple of days to enjoy the sum (I hope!) and the surf, but I'll leave you with a great find from this morning; a Northern Tamandua!

Toad Arena: The multi-layed approach

So, to continue with my "setup" series, today I'm going to talk about what I do with the toad videos once I get them! That's right folks, I am done with my first set of trials, which means I have about 65 videos that I now need to analyze. Are you keeping up with the math? 10 toads x 7 trials each = 70 trials and 70 videos. So why do I only have 65? Well, I goofed up. Around trial 4, I put a food toad in a control treatment. Sadly, because this is a learning experiment, everything that toad did after the goof could be a repercussion of being put in the wrong trial. This toad was being taught that there was a mealworm in each bowl, every time he went to the arena. Because I accidental gave him a 'control' trial, meaning no mealworms in the bowl, he had conflicting information which would most likely affect his behavior for every trial after that.

Oh, well. Sometimes in life, you make mistakes, but as long as you learn from them, it's OK. I definitely will be triple-checking to make sure that I have the right treatment for each toad from now on!!!

So yeah, back to the original point of this post. I have 65 videos of toads running around arenas, looking for food. Now what am I supposed to do?

Lucky for me, I have this handy program called Ethovision XT that will make a path of where the toad goes and tell me all sorts of things about the path. It can tell me which bowls the toad visits and in what order. It can tell me how long the toad spends in what areas of the arena. It can even tell me how fast the toad is moving (or at least, it's average speed). But just like any computer program, it comes as a blank slate, and I have to tell the program all of the things I want it to record. Ethovision is kind of fun once you get the hang of it because it's all about creating 'zones', or drawing pictures. Here is how I decided what zones to draw in order to get the information I need:

First, I started with a blank arena:

Next, I identified which part of the video is actually the arena (in pink). I also put in circles to identify where the bowls are located (in blue):

Ok, that's it, right? Nope! There's all sorts of other information I might want to know, too. For example, I might want to know how much time the toad is spending around the margin, or wall, of the arena vs. in the middle (frogs and toads have a tendency to hang around walls). I'll draw a circle in the middle of the arena and mark the inside and outside as different zones:

I might also want to know how much time the toad is spending on the bricks and cinder blocks vs. on the ground. When I tested this arena in Texas, the 4 toads I used mostly stayed on the ground. It would be interesting to see if there is a difference between these toads and the toads in the lab. To do this, I can trace the blocks in the arena (in light yellow) and make them different zones that the ground:

I might also want to know if there is a side bias. A side bias could happen if the toads are particularly attracted to one part of the arena or another. Because our arena in Gamboa is outside and there are factors we can't control (like street lights and other frogs calling), it's important to know if the toads are staying in one part of the arena longer than the rest. To do this, I split the arena into 4 equal parts, like quadrants of a graph (in yellow):

The last thing I want to know is how long it takes the toads to first enter the arena (or leave the origin). This can be accomplished by drawing a zone that the toads have to pass through if they want to leave the flower pot (in green above).

And that's it! That's all the information (probably) that I want to know about where the toads go during the trials. Next I 'run' the trials through Ethovision, and it records the path of the toad and tells me things about where it goes.

I'm excited to see what happens - I wonder if the toads will follow the same path every time they visit the arena, or if they will go to different areas each time? What do you think? Do you think your answer depends on if there is food in the bowls or not?

Will you take the path less traveled?

Well folks, sorry it's been a while since I've written, but I've been diligently crunching numbers and putting toads through trials in the arena. Long days and even longer nights! Let me give you a little breakdown of what a toad trial is like:

Step 1: Set up all of the equipment. This really just requires me to plug everything in and turn it all on. Not too hard. Remember that camera and infrared lights I have set up over the arena? 

The lights get plugged in, and the camera cord runs to a little room just beyond the dryer in the picture. In that room is a DVR box that transcribes the camera feed and plays the picture onto a computer monitor. I don't have a picture of the actual machines, but I'll take one tonight and post it later on. Here is a picture of what the arena looks like in the dark, from the camera's point of view:

Pretty neat, huh?! From here, I can watch the toads as they explore the arena. The video is in black and white, so it's a little hard to see, but I can get an idea of where they are going, what they are doing, and when then visit different areas of the trial arena. 

Step 2: Get the trials ready! Each night I have a schedule of which toads will be tested and in what order. We randomize the order in which toads get tested just in case there is any effect of toads going at the same time each night, or in the same order. What does that mean? Well, instead of toads going in order 1,2,3,4,5, they may go 3,5,2,4,1, or 2,4,3,5,1, etc. etc. There are lots of ways to randomly select what order you will do things, and some great random number generators online. 

I have 10 toads per set of trials, and 2 treatments : 10 toads / 2 treatments = 5 toads per treatment. Just to refresh your memory, my treatments are 'food' for toads that get mealworms in their bowls, and 'control' for toads that get empty bowls during trials. How do I decide which toads get which treatments? You guessed it - it's randomized! 

Note: Even though toads are randomly assigned their treatment group, they keep the same treatment group for the entire experiment. 

Now I look at the schedule, and decide if the next toad is in the food treatment. If so, I put a mealworm in each bowl in the arena. What's a mealworm?

Mealworms are the immature form of a darkling beetle, Tenebrio molitor. They are often used to feed reptiles, amphibians, birds and even fish that are kept in captive situations. We could also feed the cane toads crickets, but those are a little harder to get in Panama, and they have a tendency to escape out of the bowls! :)

Step 3: I press 'record' on the DVR box, and put the toad into the arena. Every toad gets moved in his own little flower pot, and is placed in the same spot to start:

Step 3: I wait for 60 minutes. During this time, the toads are (hopefully) exploring the arena and finding the food in the bowls. The toads that are in the control group will not find any food :(, so I'm not really sure what they do, but we'll find out when we.....

Step 4: Watch the video! Once the trial is done, I put the toad back in his happy home (or holding tank). If the toad was a control toad, then he gets a mealworm since he didn't have a chance to find any during the trial. I can download the video onto my computer and start to analyze it while I run the next trial. 

And voila! This is how it goes every night for 14 nights in a row. Tonight is night 12, so I am almost done with this group. When we're all finished, we'll feed them a nice big meal and send them on their way back to their original homes, like nothing ever happened!

Next time, I'll continue the saga and show you exactly how I analyze the videos. Stay tuned! :)

It rains in Gamboa

Despite the strange dryness of the beginning of the month, it looks like the rainy season is here to stay!