01/17/2003

Toad Treadmill Designed for Research

AUBURN, Ala. — Take one Rubbermaid™ kitchen storage canister, four wheels from an old office chair and a big dose of creativity, and what do you get?

If you’re Ray DeLamar, you get a toad treadmill—or, as DeLamar calls it, a “toadmill.” It’s among the latest weird but wonderful one-of-a-kind contraptions the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station’s (AAES) Office of Research Instrumentation has custom-made from scratch for AAES research scientists who need unusual tools and devices that simply don’t exist in the marketplace.

DeLamar developed the toad treadmill for Chelsea Ward, an Auburn University biological sciences graduate student who is investigating how toxic waste in ponds — specifically coal fly ash, a byproduct of coal-burning power plants — affects toads. The current phase of her research will determine whether exposure to the waste has an impact on toads’ metabolic rates.

“I needed some type of device that would keep the toads moving at variable rates of speed for extended periods of time,” Ward said. “I also needed it to be an airtight container with two hoses attached to it, so I could control the air flow into the container and get an accurate measurement of how much carbon dioxide the toads released while moving.”

Ward admits that when she first met with the Research Instrumentation staff to discuss her project, she had only a vague concept of what she was looking for.

“I took them the plastic container and explained what I was trying to accomplish in the study, and then I left it with them,” Ward says. “I knew they’d come up with something.”

Sure enough, they did.

“After we talked with Chelsea, I mulled the thing over in my mind for two or three days, coming up with different ideas and drawing sketches of what might work,” DeLamar said, flipping through the legal pad in which he had doodled those early diagrams and calculations. “I knew I could put a couple of belts around the canister and mount it on a drive shaft and build a power source to hook it up to, but the problem was in trying to figure out a way to suspend the container while it rotated.”

That’s when he found the chair wheels.

“We don’t throw anything away around here, ever, because you never know when you might need it,” DeLamar said. “So I started digging around, and as soon as I saw those chair wheels, I knew they were it.”

It took DeLamar a couple of days, working off and on, to assemble the toadmill and another to take it through repeated trial runs, and then it was ready to be put to the live toad test. According to Ward, it works like a charm, giving her precisely the type information she needed.

Though Research Instrumentation’s chief responsibility when it opened 20-plus years ago was to keep AAES researchers’ equipment up and running, the office through the years has developed a rock-solid reputation for designing and building unusual pieces of research equipment that have been essential to dozens of special studies.

Another recent Research Instrumentation invention, for instance, holds a lead role in an investigation into whether a Brazilian parasitic fly could become an environmentally friendly biological control weapon in the ever-intensifying battle with fire ants.

The device that DeLamar and fellow electronics technician Dustin Meadows invented is a fire-ant shocker. It resembles a metal detector, and with it, scientists can deliver electric shocks to fire ant mounds. When shocked, the ants release a chemical that attracts the tiny flies. The flies zoom in on and lay eggs in the ants; the eggs hatch into larvae that eat their way to the ants’ heads, causing the heads to fall off.

DeLamar and Meadows thrive on such challenges.

“All these kinds of projects keep our job interesting,” DeLamar said. “They (research scientists) cook these things up in their heads, and we build ’em.”

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News from:

Office of Ag Communications & Marketing

Auburn University College of Agriculture
Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station
3 Comer Hall, Auburn University
Auburn, AL 36849
334-844-4877 (PHONE) 334-844-5892 (FAX)

Contact Jamie Creamer, 334-844-2783 or jcreamer@auburn.edu
Contact Ray DeLamar, 334-844-3252 or delamrm@auburn.edu

01/17/03

For immediate release