Exploding Toads Puzzle German Scientists, as “more than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks”:
The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.“It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie,” Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. “The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die.”
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The pond’s water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg, the toads did not appear to have a disease, and a laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, she said.