Where are the UK’s midwife toad populations?

It’s been just over week since we launched our crowdfunder and what a week it has been! First of all, we’ve made 30% of our goal which is amazing. Thank you to all of those that have already donated, please continue to share the campaign among your networks. Secondly, we’ve been able to swab the toads from another population! One of our friends has a colony of toads in captivity that were founded from individuals from the St Albans population, these have now been swabbed and the samples are on their way to the lab. Our plan is to swab a small number of other populations before the end of the September (weather permitting).

With that quick update out of the way, it’s time to address a question that has been asked by a number of people since the launch of the campaign. Where exactly are the UK’s midwife toad populations? Below is a quick map we’ve been able to compile over the past few months based on our knowledge of the UK’s midwife toad populations. You may notice that we’ve taken a number of samples from the ‘Bedford cluster’, we expect all of these toads to have the same origin but we won’t know until we analyse them. As you can see we still need to swab individuals from a number of populations to get a complete picture of their relationships to one another, hopefully we can fit those in this year or plan ahead and make visits to those populations next year. There are also a handful of historic populations which may now be extinct but we can’t be certain without first conducting some ground truthing to determine where or not they still persist. Even if they don’t we’re still going to have our hands full!

 

As you can see, we still have a lot of work to do and there may be some more populations we discover along the way

There is also the possibility that there are current unknown populations that we discover either by someone directly contacting us, word of mouth or some other means. If you know of a population of midwife toads that is not highlighted on the map above please do get in touch. There are a small number of populations we’re currently investigating that haven't been included due to the fact that we’re not sure yet if the records are genuine or not. If all goes to plan we should be able to update you on our progress throughout the remainder of time during this so-far successful campaign. The map above (sorry for some of the rough edges) is intended to act as a ‘living map’ so as the project progresses, we’ll update it and post a new one with each new Lab Note. That way it allows everyone to observe our progress visually without having to read paragraphs of text to work out what we’ve been up to.

Finally now everything is underway I’d like to thank a few people for helping make the project a reality. We’ve been in touch with a number of the local biological records centres in order to gain information of local midwife toad records, thanks to everyone who has been able to aid us so far. Members of the public have also been in touch to see if the toads they have in their garden are midwife toads and if so, how they could help. Thanks to everyone who has assisted us so far. It’s helping to lay down the foundations of the project going forward. Making this dream a reality is heavily dependent on your donations, no matter how big or small they all add up. Thanks again for all your generosity!