An interesting fact...

Today Abigail Alex and I went back to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Slimbridge. We watched three beautiful otters playing; we fell in love with a moorhen chick; we went to "Africa"...

... and felt we had stepped through a door into Uganda when we entered the Tropical House...

Because we will probably go there lots of times, (family membership...!), I announced to the children on the way in that I wanted to learn one really interesting fact today. And I did, and this was it:

In the amphibians section is one tank with a repulsive, large, white toad floating upright and motionless in the middle. Abby thought it was dead at first. But when it suddenly moved, its webbed white feet revealed themselves to have sharp black claws - you've guessed it, it was an African Clawed Toad!

Well, the innocuous sign below it read something like this: "The African Clawed Toad was kept as a laboratory animal in the 1960's. It was used for testing for pregnancy. When a woman's urine was injected into it, if she was pregnant the toad would produce eggs within 24 hours."

!!!