Measuring Toad Jumps

Here's a philosophical question for you - and maybe especially for you, Billy: 

Why would someone who's within spitting distance of the end of their PhD spend the time measuring how far a baby toad jumps? 

 

I guess the relevant question here is: why would anyone want to measure the jumping performance of anything?

Well, eco-physiologists (like we sometimes are) use locomotor performance (like jumping, swimming, running) as a proxy for fitness. And not 'fitness' as in - how hard you puff after a stint on the treadmill ... but, rather, fitness in terms of an individual's ability to survive/reproduce/pass awesome genes on to the next generation.

That's where Billy comes in. Because he's interested in looking at how the environment that a tadpole develops in affects its long-term fitness - specifically, after metamorphosis. Billy raised tadpoles in environments that differed in temperature and the presence/absence of predator cues. 

Tadpoles can tell if a predator in their environment has been munching on other tadpoles, and they often respond by changing their body shape, their behaviour, and their growth rates. These are also traits affected by temperature ... so it's important to consider both factors together.

And now? Billy has to test how newly-metamorphosed toads are likely to fare in life on land. Jumping is relevant because these little guys have to escape from predators (including big toads), catch their food, and move between habitats.

To measure jumping performance, Billy has to take each toad out of its pebbly plastic home, and dry it off. (Which, contrary to this very incriminating picture suggests ... is done quite gently).

Then, he motivates each toad to jump three times - and takes the measurement from the longest jump as the toad's best. He also measures the body size of the toad, to account for the fact that bigger toads can jump farther - just because they're bigger.

To recap: Billy's working slaving away in the lab to find out whether temperature and the presence of predators interact in a tadpole's environment to influence the jumping performance of the toad after it undergoes metamorphosis. Pretty cool stuff, right?

We'll let you know when we've got an answer!