Odd News of the Day Award

I keep thinking this must be a hoax or a joke, but so far it appears it's not. AP reported on Wednesday that

[m]ore than 1,000 toads have puffed up and exploded in a Hamburg pond in recent weeks, and scientists still have no explanation for what's causing the combustion, an official said Wednesday. ...

The toads at a pond in the upscale neighborhood of Altona have been blowing up since the beginning of the month, filling up like balloons until their stomachs suddenly burst.

"It looks like a scene from a science-fiction movie," Werner Schmolnik, the head of a local environment group, told the Hamburger Abendblatt daily. "The bloated animals suffer for several minutes before they finally die."

AFP quoted Schmolnik as saying

"You see the animals crawling on the ground, swelling and then exploding."

He said the bodies of the toads expanded to three and a half times their normal size.

AFP also added the quaint detail that "their entrails were propelled for up to a meter."

So far there is no explanation.

The pond's water quality is no better or worse than other bodies of water in Hamburg, the toads did not appear to have a disease, and a laboratory in Berlin has ruled out the possibility that it is a fungus that made its way from South America, [Janne Kloepper, of the Hamburg-based Institute for Hygiene and the Environment,] said.

Where are Mulder and Scully when you really need them?