Monday, Jan. 17, 1955
The Toads of Clayesmore
By Eton and Harrow standards, strange things happen on the playing fields of Clayesmore. A small (290 pupils), progressive school in Dorset. Clayesmore believes in strenuous academic fare as well as in teaching its boys to fell trees, lay bricks, mix concrete, build walls, weave baskets. It also likes them to study nature in field and forest. Last week British scientific circles were buzzing over just how far Clayesmore will go. The school had suddenly emerged as a full-fledged authority on the toad.
If there is one thing that Clayesmore has plenty of, it is toads. Every winter hundreds of little corpses litter the highway, and hundreds of live toads congregate to breed in the school's lake or empty swimming pool. How do the toads get there? In 1950 Biology Teacher H. J. Moore collected a band of boys, started them on a Kinsey-type study of the annual migration. Through snow and sleet and dark of night, the study has gone on ever since.
Garters & Shorts. To gauge the size of the migration, the boys spent morning after morning counting corpses before classes. But keeping track of the live toads proved infinitely more difficult. The boys tried putting elastic garters on them, only to find that the toads could easily shake them off. Then they tried painting the toads, but no paint would stay. They even tried sewing little numbered "running shorts" on them, soon discovered that clothing a wriggling toad in the dark, often in heavy rain and cold weather, is just about impossible. Finally, "with some reluctance." they hit upon the idea of cutting off a toe.
Through the 21 to 75 days it takes all the toads to complete their migration, night patrols watched in all weathers. They learned that the male toads outnumbered the females two to one, that the males walked while the females hopped as well. They also learned that in a 24-hour period of the migration, the average toad covers at least three-quarters of a mile, that he will refuse to eat en route, no matter how many worms are dangled in front of him. Occasionally the males fight over a female, and the fights sometimes turn into a regular free-for-all. Gradually the boys' notebooks began to fill with observations: "4th March, 1952. In order to measure certain migrating males, I gathered them together and one or two were entangled on the ground. The others approached the scrum and joined in the fun, everyone kicking and croaking."
How Do They Know? The habits of the toad are certainly mysterious. Why is it that they always insist on climbing over an obstacle, even when it would be far easier to go under? And how do they know where their breeding ground is? They seem to follow no particular leader, nor do they travel in processions or with any apparent system whatsoever. To find out whether they might be following their sense of smell, the boys smeared the toads' nostrils with Vaseline, but the uncooperative toads promptly wiped it off.
All in all, there are many puzzles the boys could not solve. But after four years they did collect enough data for Teacher Moore to write a learned paper. Last week Clayesmore got its reward: its final report--"Some Observations on the Migration of the Toad (Bufo Bufo Bufo)"--filled the entire current issue of no less a publication than the British Journal of Herpetology. Said Headmaster D. P. M. Burke proudly: "A valuable educational experience. Just the sort of thing we are trying to encourage at Clayesmore." Next project for the boys: the autumn migration of the toad.
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