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I'm attempting to do a few small expirements with my toads. Bufo sp. Does anyone have any pointers. Things will be quite simple like seeing if they look for food by local cues or absolute refernces, etc. I'm still in the planing stages and if anyone wants to offer tips i'm listening.

Normally, an experiment is conducted testing hypotheses.

To begin with, you need to form some hypotheses to test...for instance:

Hypothesis: Toads locate food by sense of smell only.

How would you test this? You would need a control group of toads with all sensory organs working properly. Then you would take a group that have their eyes covered, another group that have their ears covered, another group that have eyes and ears covered and another group that have only their nostrils covered and finally another group that have eyes, ears and nostrils covered. Then you would introduce food items that they are known to eat into the enclosure and record how many of each group were able to find their food. Now, you have some problems with your data. For instance, how many of them could actually find the food, but just ween't hungry? From that you can see that each group needs to be tested multiple times, each group has to have had the same amount of food at the same interval previous to beginning the test.

OK.. now let's say that over a course of 10 test instances and 10 toads in each group, the results came out like this:

Control group: 90% of the toads found food.
Group 1 (eyes covered): None of the toads found food in any of the tests.
Group 2 (ears covered): 90% of the toads found food
Group 3 (nostrils covered): 90% of the toads found food
Group 4 (eyes and ears covered): none of the toads found food in any of the tests.
Group 5 (eyes, ears and nostrils overed): None of the toads found food in any of the tests.

What does this data tell you? Look for common elements here. The only thing that was comman about the results is that the toads that had use of their eyes had a high rate of individuals that could find their food. What about the one that didn't in each group that had a 90% rate of finding food? Statistically, you can throw that out and chalk it up to not being hungry, especially since the control group had a similar result. Does that tell you that toads find food by eyesight only? No, not definitively. But, it does give you another hypothesis to test. Does it tell you that toads don't use their sense of smell or hearing at all in locating food? No, but that gives you yet another hypothesis to design a test for...to see if sense of smell and hearing play any part at all. It may be that eyesight is the primary sense used in locating food, but other senses play a more minor role.

Then, to further narrow down the visual cues used, you would begin to test different colored food items, different sized food items, different shaped food items, etc.

Is that what you were asking?