Tiny toads fitted with backpacks

A University of Alberta researcher is strapping tiny backpacks to toads in an effort to discover why one species is in serious decline.


Connie Browne, a PhD student in the Department of Biological Sciences, is spending this summer haunting the ponds and sloughs in northern Alberta, Canada, using tiny radio transmitter backpacks to track Canadian and Western toads.

Browne hopes to capture 12 of each kind and using soft surgical tubing, she will belt the toads into tiny, waterproof oval ’backpacks’ containing radio transmitters. The signals travel up to one kilometre and will allow Browne to locate the toads and to take note of their preferred habitat.

Browne began radio-tracking toads at Elk Island National Park east of Edmonton, Alberta last year, and confirming earlier research, was unable to spot a single Canadian toad. In fact, she’s never seen one. The small, bumpy-skinned species, which dines on grasshoppers and other invertebrates, plays a valuable role in the food web and crop pest control. It has become locally extinct. “We’ve changed the environment so much, they can’t survive anymore,” Browne said. “It indicates the aspen parkland is not as healthy as it used to be.”

Browne’s studies will offer up clues as to how a balance can be struck between land development and the need to preserve breeding, foraging and hibernation habitats for toads and other amphibious species.

Some toads carry their transmitters for only a few days before slipping out of the belt, while others have worn them for as long as six months. Last year, Browne was able to track 12 toads to hibernation and describe their hibernation sites. The transmitters were then removed and the toads released for the winter.

Media Contact

Bev Betkowski EurekAlert!

More Information:

http://www.ualberta.ca

All latest news from the category: Life Sciences and Chemistry

Articles and reports from the Life Sciences and chemistry area deal with applied and basic research into modern biology, chemistry and human medicine.

Valuable information can be found on a range of life sciences fields including bacteriology, biochemistry, bionics, bioinformatics, biophysics, biotechnology, genetics, geobotany, human biology, marine biology, microbiology, molecular biology, cellular biology, zoology, bioinorganic chemistry, microchemistry and environmental chemistry.

Back to home

Comments (0)

Write a comment

Newest articles

Lighting up the future

New multidisciplinary research from the University of St Andrews could lead to more efficient televisions, computer screens and lighting. Researchers at the Organic Semiconductor Centre in the School of Physics and…

Researchers crack sugarcane’s complex genetic code

Sweet success: Scientists created a highly accurate reference genome for one of the most important modern crops and found a rare example of how genes confer disease resistance in plants….

Evolution of the most powerful ocean current on Earth

The Antarctic Circumpolar Current plays an important part in global overturning circulation, the exchange of heat and CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere, and the stability of Antarctica’s ice sheets….

Partners & Sponsors