At 04:09 PM 1/2/01 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> >I would like to respectfully disagree here. I agree that geckos and >other
> >aggressive demolishers of prey are pretty safe. However, I
> have >personally
> >lost a pair of leopard frogs to mealworm-inflicted internal >injuries---we
> >didn't have autopsies done, so I have only circumstantial evidence >that
> the
> >mealworms were at fault, but I found the circumstantial evidence >extremely
> >convincing. (Briefly: No symptoms other than obvious physical >discomfort,
> >the frogs that ate of the mealworms died and the one that refused >them
> >didn't, and other species that ate from the same batch were fine, so >I
> >don't think it was a batch of poisoned worms.)
>
>Nathan, I am sorry for the loss of your frogs, but it is impossible to
>make such an assertion (OK not impossible - you just did ;) based on the
>evidence you cite.
I hate to belabor the point, but I feel like I'm being asked to
substantiate a claim here. I realize that frogs are peripheral to geckos
and the whole thing is nominally off-topic; on the other hand, my reading
of that experience is "be careful where mealworms might be swallowed
whole", and I can see that happening with some of the larger geckos, for
instance---grab a mouthful, chomp, swallow, and perhaps a worm in the
middle didn't really get bitten through---so I don't feel like it's
completely irrelevant.
I don't claim absolute certainty, but I do find the circumstantial evidence
pretty convincing, certainly convincing enough to affect my feeding practices.
The frogs were longterm captives, a trio who had been living under similar
conditions for a good long time, all seemingly in good health as the story
opened. We'd very rarely fed them mealworms, for no particularly serious
reason except that they seemed kind of chitiny and less nutritious, bug for
bug, than crickets. One evening they, and several critters of other taxa
scattered around the house, got a moderate serving of mealworms---two of
the frogs took, the third didn't. Sometime during the night---one before
bedtime, the other at some unknown hour before morning---the two who had
eaten the mealworms went into a state that seemed clearly to be a response
to some kind of physical discomfort---basically lethargic, but with a lot
of shifting their bodies around slightly, as if searching for a comfortable
position. (Anthropomorphic, yes, but I don't know any way to interpret
animal behavior without a degree of anthropomorphism; I think "animals in
pain seek comfortable body positions" is a fairly small anthropomorphic
leap as such things go.) Both died within 24 hours. Nobody else developed
a problem, including their cagemate. I've never been able to see
conditions that applied to the two afflicted frogs and not to the survivor
or to the other taxa, except for the mealworms being swallowed whole.
Certainly there are other possibilities. Some lurking, quick-acting,
nearly asymptomatic disorder may have chosen that moment and those frogs to
pull its trigger. Something in the distant past may have happened to those
two frogs and taken so long to catch up that I never thought to connect it
with their deaths. Those possibilities sort of fail the Occam's Razor
test, though, and I feel like the only way to prefer them as explanations
is a kind of special pleading based on the conviction that the obvious
explanation *couldn't* be right.
I see a situation affecting some animals and not others, a condition whose
symptoms follow with some plausibility from that situation (they do swallow
prey whole, prey can live for quite a while in a frog digestive system, the
behavior was superficially consistent with abdominal injuries and not like
behaviors I've seen in more conventionally sick animals), and a perfect
correlation between the two. That's not conclusive, but it's well worth
noticing.
Of course the sample size is so small as to be meaningless statistically;
that's the nature of anecdotal observations in private collections, and I
don't foresee anyone commissioning large mealworm studies, so we aren't
going to get statistical significance on this front.
If I'd known I was going to have to defend the analysis in court, I would
have had them autopsied. At the time the mealworm business was already a
piece of folk wisdom, for good or ill, and we felt pretty sure we
understood what had happened, so an autopsy seemed needless.
I'm a little mystified by the responses I'm getting here; from what people
have written you'd think I'd gone no further than "they ate them and died,
THAT PROVES MEALWORMS ARE BAD!"---I'm not *that* naive and I don't feel as
if my precis of the event invited that reading...did it?
NT
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