By Rob Tranchin, KERA News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/kera/local-kera-942600.mp3
Dallas, TX – When the Horned Frogs of TCU face the Wisconsin Badgers in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day, millions of football fans across the nation may be surprised to discover that the TCU mascot is actually a lizard that many Texans call a toad. KERA's Rob Tranchin brings us the story.
Rob: You can't blame Texas Christian University for not calling its fighting Frogs football team "The Horny Toads."
But that's one of the popular names for the actual creature that serves as TCU's mascot.
Burgess: "Horny toads" is what we used to call them when we were kids here in Fort Worth.
Rob: TCU Environmental Studies professor Tony Burgess.
Burgess: The frog comes from the fact that it's all warty and knobby and spiny and looked more like a toad, but if you actually look at it, it's a lizard. It's not a frog at all. And they're made to look like rocks. So their idea is to stay still, disappear, keep relatively invisible until something smaller than they are that looks edible, especially harvester ants, comes along and then they can lap them up.
Rob: 50 years ago, Texas horned lizards--their real name--were plentiful across the metroplex. Today, they're gone, their range now limited to West and South Texas.
Why did they leave? Scientists have looked at herbicides and competition from fire ants, but Burgess points to a broad transformation of the North Texas landscape.
Burgess: If you think about the difference, when I was a child in the 1950s, that was one of the worst droughts we had had in this century. So if you take those beaten-up suburban, patchy, weedy, lawns that we had with a lot of bare dirt, they were fine for the harvester ants that the horned lizard ate, and the horned lizards could basically move around in them pretty well.
But you take these highly irrigated green lawns of Bermuda grass and St. Augustine, there's no way those lizards could get through it. And of course, then they're sitting ducks not just for children but for crows and anything else that would want to eat them like dogs and stray cats.
Rob: Even if there were any real horned lizards left in Fort Worth, for a football team with national championship aspirations, the horny toad makes for an awkward mascot.
Burgess: They're not fast, they're not agile, they're relatively slow-moving. I've seen some film clips of them when the males interact. They kind of butt heads a little bit, but they frankly don't have the equipment to be very aggressive. They can't bite you, they can't do much to you at all, and of course everybody likes to flip them on their back and rub their belly and see if you can get them to fall asleep.
Rob: Even so, Burgess sees something in the Texas horned lizard that just might win the game: patience.
Burgess: In the arid situations that they live in, food is not very dependable. So the idea is to make a living conservatively, husbanding your resources and your energy so you don't starve to dearth waiting for the good times. Aggression uses up a lot of energy that the horned lizard simply can't afford to squander. On the other hand, what they do is endure. When the opportunity presents itself, they will pounce.
Rob: Regardless of the outcome of Saturday's football game, Burgess says we'll continue to see the plants and animals of the southern plains move in response to climate change and other changes in the environment.
Given the right conditions, horny toads might even return to North Texas. Until then, just call them "fighting Frogs."