Slashdot Mirror
Exploding Toads
Badly Configured writes "The city of Hamburg in Germany is plagued by exploding amphibians (The Times, BBC, press release from the city, in German). People are warned not to go near the unstable animals for the fear of being hit. Experts have tested the toads for bacteria and chemicals, yet the reason for the animals going off remains a mystery..." From the article: "The toads' entrails are propelled for up to a metre (3.2ft), in scenes that have been likened to science fiction. Scientists are baffled. Possible explanations include a unknown virus or a fungus in the pond. "
I think maybe I know.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Imagine waking up christmas morning, and one of your presents jumps up into the air? That would rock. Everyone will want an exploding toad for christmas.
There must be a Scanner in the area practicing. If I lived near there, I think I'd move away quickly!
Exploding Toads? Back in my day we had Exploding Whales. Well OK, it was only one whale, and they used a half-ton of dynamite, but it was still very impressive!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
this is somehting i would expect from robot chicken...
In other news, hordes of Frenchmen we seen heading to the border with a knife and fork in each hand!
If you give a liberal an enema, he'll turn transparent.
or as the hip kids say these days "climate change". Either that or we have to go find a relevant passage in the bible (preferably the book of revelations) or some random drawl that nostradamus pumped out.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I remember a long time ago seeing a rather disgusting documentary about regular plague-level swarms of animals, including frogs. At the breeding time of the year, they would swarm over the roads and part of a town in their urge to find spawning grounds. And then there was this guy who was paid to run over frogs in his car to try and reduce the number of frogs that invaded the town. Anyway, that's irrelevent background information.
The point that I remember that's appropriate: frogs can't burp. So they would explode if this guy ran them over from the back-first (rather then head-first, where their guts were squeezed out of their backside). So what's probably happening here is:
(1) The toads eat something nasty.
(2) The nasty thing releases *a lot* of gas as it's digested.
(3) The toad can't burp - and for some reason can't fart either - so it swells up and eventually explodes.
Anyway, that's my best guess based on the information in those articles: something foreign (but not necessarily toxic) has got into their food supply.
I hope the alleged virus doesn't coss over to humans, it won't be pretty!
OTOH, I can see the military building a new lab already (The weapon is successful, sir! Germans are exploding all over the place!)
Whoops - did I just mention ze war?
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Damn, these stupid April Fools' stories just keep on coming in. Now seriously, this sounds so whacked-out wicked, I'm almost considering going over just to check it out myself. Biologist slashdotters, what is this? Exessive gas buildup? Digestive problems? Too much beans?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I was hoping one of news services would have video. It would be best if there was one illustrating the suicide maneuver, startling a crow diving in for attack.
I like the theory of suicide, with one generation protecting the the future generations as all crows will from now on be scared off.
What we're really going to find is kids have been feeding them PopRocks at night.
Did anyone see the most recent episode of the new Doctor Who? It's on topic if you saw it, it's a spoiler if you didn't...
In any case, maybe the Germans are just throwing alot of vinegar down the drain and don't realize where it's all going...
[o]_O
... they inflate themselves to look larger when they're attacked by crows, who are after their liver. So the crows try to pick out the liver through the frogs skin and penetrate the skin (not the balloon which is inflated). The frogs inflated themselves even more and their skin ruptures ... boom!
reminds me of the prank with the straw, but even cooler =)
A prankster putting explosives in toads?
Yanno, mentioning that the guts were propelled 3.2 feet into the air sounds kinda like someone had nothing better to do than to measure the size of the splats with more precision than most people would consider sane. Now, I've had my suspicions about the Germans, but this is worse than anything I've previously read.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
Wow. Screw cremation. Screw being burried. This is how I want to go. Just tie my carcass to a medium sized rocket full of explosvies, fire me up, and boom. I think that's a good way for people to remember me by.
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
Charles Forte didn't live to see this. He would have loved it.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
You're probably refering to the Austrailian documentary Cane Toads.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0130529/
The actual distance is 3.141592653 feet.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In April 2002, ananova.com carried a story about how passing cars could make toads explode.
From the article (in my local archive):
Air pressure from passing cars 'causes toads to explode'
Passing cars can make toads crossing roads explode without even touching them.
A German researcher says they cause a sudden rise in air pressure which can be fatal for the amphibians.
Professor Dietrich Hummel, of Braunschweig, measured the suction caused by cars in a wind tunnel.
He says any speed over 20mph can can cause toads to explode and is calling for speed limits on toad-crossing blackspots.
He told The Mirror: "The bigger the clearance, the better it is for the toad. A Formula 1 car would be a disaster."
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
... and put on the TV they would know that world famous Geologist Randy Marsh already discovered this problem and how to solve it ...
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
blipverts?
"Yeah. What's the big deal?"
"Lemme tell ya bout it, stud!"
"him name is hopkin green frog
ps. i'll find my frog"
Well, I think we have a pretty good clue now.
I want to see a video.
1 Exploding toads
2 ???
3 ?!??!!!
3 Profit!
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
If were lucky, they can isolate the disease and use it to infect the cane toads in Australia. Exploding poisonous toads!
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Mmmhmm.. April 27th... no 1st... something is wrong...
It's actually also happening in Denmark now.
In a small town in western Denmark called Laasby, the toads are also exploding. Another weird thing is, that it often occurs between 2 and 3 in the night.
Please God no cross species infection!
They are obviously imitating Serious Sam! There you get toads en masse - best to kill before they explode in your face with greenish acid slime...
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
I wonder how effective a directional microwave would be. Not too difficult to make - just find an old microwave and rearrange the pieces. I remember the people who stand in front of microwave transmitters to warm up - consider that a toad is probably a 100-200 times lighter than a human, and I bet that if you put a toad in a microwave it'd explode too. Note I'm NOT recommending this, it'd probably make a horrible mess that might well help poison you as well. But I bet it's possible to make a directional beam from a standard microwave unit, and I don't find it difficult to believe that toads might be used as a target for this, especially after the first one sent its guts skyward by 3.2 feet (which, incidentally, is probably an approximation for 1 metre when posting to an imperial-measure country.)
Browsing with +2 to insightful posts and a higher threshold makes the average post seen seem a lot more ingenious
I for one welcome our new exploding toad overlords
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
A few years ago there was something similar in the UK, frogs developed some kind of infection that caused them to become "spawn bound". The females couldn't lay their spawn, instead they became all bloated and reddish in colour. Eventually they ruptured. Not quite as explosive as the toads, but it was pretty vile as I'd agreed to clear my parents pond right when this was happening.
(At the time I had a friend who wasn't much good with ladies. He was quite fat, so in honour of the frogs it was decided that he was "sperm bound".)
As a parent of three kids who like frogs & toads, this concerns me. My children are handling explosives!
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
...my Illudium Q-36 Explosive Toad Modulator.
*click**beep**beep* Scotty, One to Mod up!
Back in high school I heard about a "prank" where you feed alka seltzer to sea gulls and watch them explode. Perhaps this mystery can be solved by the local bored teenagers.
terrorist toads... virgin toads for the martyr...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
We're obliged to those readers who sent us the breathless news that today's Der Spiegel says crows have been fingered as the culprits. Apparently the crow pecks a small hole in the toad to get at the liver. The toad begins to inflate itself - its normal defence mechanism - but because there is no separation between lung cavity and abdomen, the poor blighter keeps on expanding until it goes pop. That's the gist of it, at least. We're going to conclude by noting that if you tried to make this up, your friends would probably advise you to seek professional help.