Toad time

Well, the toads have been more cooperative than the leopard frogs so far.  I wouldn't exactly say they are doing just what we want, but they are at least laying eggs.  We have two separate groups doing ecotoxicology projects on southern toads right now.  A few of us are setting up a huge experiment to look at copper as I've talked about before.  Brian Metts is setting up some studies to look at coal fly ash.  Brian is wrapping up his PhD examining the effects of fly ash on amphibians and this will make the final chapter.  With the work we all are doing right now I could really relate to an article I read yesterday about being a scientist.  One quote: "My job, in essence, is to move small amounts of liquid from one place to another. That's it"can ring true when I'm doing a ton of lab work.  It's odd that I can convince myself it is more interesting to move liquid when it's DNA from a really cool species, or even more when it's RNA, but the truth is it all looks like water and I move tiny amounts of it from tube to tube.  That actually may be more exciting than what Brian gets to do right now.  For his work one of the things he needs to measure is clutch size (number of eggs a female lays) of toads.  Clutch size is one thing that can be strongly affected by exposure to contaminants so it's an important variable to measure. But measuring it really sucks.  Toads lay a lot of eggs, seriously, a lot of eggs.  Trying to count them all in one sitting you'd never keep track so he separates the clutch into 5 of more bins and takes pictures.  Toads lay their eggs in long strings so in a bin you can kind of spread them out in a way that there is just one layer of eggs, then with a photo you can count at your leisure and keep track of which you've counted.  He has to measure a lot of clutches so this will take some time.  The two pictures show two such bins.  The top one is pretty good, but counting the bottom one will be annoying b/c their not spread out into one even layer.  So, sometimes being a scientist means counting all day long for many days.  I only had to count eggs from 78 small containers today, with only about 20-30 eggs per container so no so bad!