[vyper]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4716252.stm

[q] To investigate their worrying spread, scientists looked at cane toads invading the Northern Territory of Australia, at a site about 60km east of Darwin.

They caught the toads, measured them, and also attached a radio-transmitter, weighing about 5-6g, around their waist to track their movements.

"During an invasion process the individuals at the front are there because they have moved the furthest," explained Dr Ben Phillips, an author on the paper and an evolutionary biologist at the University of Sydney, Australia.

"We showed that the toads that are the first to arrive at the front are the ones with the longest legs, and the ones last to arrive have shorter legs.

"The front toads also have much longer legs than the older populations in Queensland." [/q]

[Wild Fragaria]

That's what I like to see and call out loud -- Evolution! 

Nature News   Published online: 15 February 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060213-4 


Need to get somewhere fast? Growing longer legs is the cane toad's answer. The amphibian pest is accelerating its march across the Australian landscape, leaving a trail of ecological devastation.

Cane toads (Bufo marinus) were first introduced to the country 70 years ago in an attempt to control beetles. But the invader began eating other native fauna and spread across much of the country, wreaking havoc along the way (see 'The toads are coming!').

In the frog world, the cane toad is typically thought of as a slow plodder. But, in a report published in this week's Nature, researchers from the University of Sydney debunk this perception.

By strapping tiny radiotransmitters to the toads' waists, the researchers revealed that they can travel at an alarming rate. The sprinters can move up to 1.8 kilometres a night and generally opt to travel along roads. "The toads are making it on their own - they aren't hitchhiking on the back of trucks as had been suspected," says Richard Shine, who led the research team.

"Toads are slow. They don't jump, they just kind of crawl. The idea that they are long-distance athletes is amusing and surprising," says David Skelly, an amphibian ecologist at Yale University in Connecticut.

So how are they making the distance so easily? Shine and his colleagues looked at preserved museum specimens and historical records and found that the toads have become 25% leggier and fivefold faster over a 60-year period.

The researchers checked that the long legs really do translate into speedy crawling. Camping out in the wilderness in advance of the pests' invasive front, the researchers measured leg length as the newcomers arrived. They found that the first arrivals had legs stretching up to 45% of their total body length. Later waves of toads consisted of shorter-limbed kinfolk; frogs arriving a year later had legs measuring about 40% of their body length.

Although insects and bacteria quickly adapt to changing circumstances, Skelly says this study is one of the first known examples of a vertebrate rapidly evolving in a new environment. "People have this deep-seated feeling that vertebrates don't evolve on of these sorts of timescales. But this work shows that it can happen," says Skelly. Cane toads typically start breeding at the age of one year, and can produce some 200,000 eggs in an average ten-year lifespan.

Accelerating cane toads are bad news for conservationists. "The toads will make it to Western Australia earlier than thought. We need to do something pretty quick," says Shine. Despite attempts to curtail the invaders, it looks - for now at least - as if the cane toad is outpacing such efforts.

[aldo_14]

Interesting, this.  Although just wait until they start exploding.

[Grug]

Its often a Queensland community recreation to go toad hunting at night. It's a family tradition to grab a few torches, some plastic bags, salt, and a golf club to boot.

Plastic bags are for grabbing them and freezing them. Salt is for throwing on thier backs which envitably kills them. Then there's the good old game of toad golf. Whack the bastards as far as you can. (Rinse and repeat)

Sometimes we'll do the old kero on the toad and throw a match. But you always end up with brown burnt grass over your lawn.

I think our animals are finally adapting to kill them though. I've seen crows flipping them over and getting at their vulnerable belly and avoiding the poisen. I think that's where my dog got it from, watching the crows.

But yeah, they are a pain and a pest. It's common to see dead toads squashed over on the road after a storm. Forces them out of the drains, and then people aim for them in their car and listen for the "pop!".

EDIT: As for the german toads exploding, I wouldn't be surprised if someone dumped something in the pond...

[Martinus]

but... but... but... the bible says...

[aldo_14]

"Thou shalt not grow longer legs, thou shalt wait thy turn in queues, thy lazy moochers"

[Flipside]

And before anyone thinks Grug is being cruel to them, these things are probably the single most serious threat to an Ecosystem that has happened so far on this planet. It makes the Rabbit thing look like Watership Down.

Glad to hear that the predators are evolving to deal with them too, that's very good news

[Bobboau]

we can't use this in an argument with a creationist untill we take an austrailian toad and a toad from there origonal population and try to inter-breed them and fail.

[Wild Fragaria]

I don't like people hunting them for fun.  I like it better if people hunt and eat the froggy or toady  

[Grug]

I daresay cooked caintoad would taste like crap. Even kangaroo meat is meant to be a bit iffy. (They're all full of worms anyway)

We kill them because they eat our native frogs and kill other wildlife with their poison, fun is just a bonus.

[Bobboau]

IIRC the toads are poisonous.
there hunted for fun because there invasive.

anyway, the native animals will simply adapt to them eventualy, the only way you might be able to kill them off would be to introduce another animal to kill them, or a deseise, ether of with is probly a bad idea for obvius reasons.

I do find it somewhat ironic how so many animals were intentionaly killed that we now wish weren't, and now with a concerted effort to kill this thing you can't, think of all the native animals that were driven into extinction on bounties and you do the same thing on this criter and it just keeps on going.

[Flipside]

Yup, Australia has none-too-good memories of Myxomatosis....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxomatosis

[Deepblue]

Longer legs =! speciation.

Move along, move along.

[Shade]

Maybe you can pass them off as frogs to the french and have some kind of 'catch your own dinner' tourism project?

[aldo_14]

I was (initially) somewhat surprised at the mutation occuring, myself; normally that sort of physical change is uncommon IIRC because being faster, etc, has an impact upon energy needs and whatnot that makes it a disadvantage (hence - amongst other reasons - why we don't have gazelles and cheetahs that run at 200mph).  I guess the cane toad population must be reaching a (local) sort of critical mass that means migration is of key importance in survival, and presumably the shorter-legged toads are getting killed off as a result of either some local over-population or simply being unable to travel as far.  Can't help but wonder if 10,20 years down the line we'll find a sort of radius of increasing leg-length as you spread out from the initial source of origin, or if it'll settle down in a way that the 'leading edge' is generally longer legged and the settled populations see a decrease to a shorter leg length.

Longer legs =! speciation.

Move along, move along.

Evidence of evolutionary action and natural selection causing significant physical changes in existing species; yet more evidence supporting and indeed illustrating the mechanics of evolution.

[Deepblue]

Turn a frog into a mammal. Than you can slap creationists in the face.

Until then, ho hum.

[aldo_14]

Turn a frog into a mammal. Than you can slap creationists in the face.

Until then, ho hum.

Why the hell are you expecting convergent evolution from an animal (well, animal archetype) that has evolved to fit within a specific environmental niche?  What possible survival advantage is there to drive mutations converging into a space inhabited by better adapted, dominant species?

That's just daft - you're actually proposing the opposite of the effect of evolution; that rather than diverging, species will somehow all combine into some homogenous group of identical characteristics.

Although, they've already got examples of speciation, of course.

EDIt; not to mention the shared genes, molecules and common apical ectodermal ridge features that are shared between amphibians and humans (in particular), pointing to a shared ancestry.  Oh, and the transitional fossils between fish and amphibians like Kenichthys, Acanthostega, or Ichthyostega.

Oh, and evolution is, to reinforce the blinding obvious, a diverging and branching 'action';  evolution does not travel 'up' biological classification trees, but down; an evolved new species retains the biological classification of it's ancestor species, and exists on the level below.

[vyper]

Turn a frog into a mammal. Than you can slap creationists in the face.

Until then, ho hum.

Can I do it with a Toad instead?

[Deepblue]

Go ahead.

Depending on what "it" is.

[vyper]

Oh please don't let my sense of humour prevent you from addressing aldo's preceeding post.