Mystery surrounds hitchhiker that hopped into Cork student’s suitcase

IN her lodgings in India, toads insisted on climbing into her suitcase.

She evicted them more than once.

On the day Cathy Duggan, a UCC student, was leaving New Delhi, she checked her suitcase carefully.

Nevertheless, one of the cheeky toads managed to stay hidden, and so reached Ireland and Cork where, to Cathy’s amazement, it clambered out of her suitcase and, apparently totally unfazed by its journey, prepared to take up residence in its new home.

Perhaps it hoped Cathy would buss it on the cheek and turn it into an Irish prince.

Undetected, the adventurous amphibian had passed through security in India and the UK. It must have been extremely thirsty, one imagines. A friend tells me that when camping in the Great Australian Desert he and his wife cooked an omelet in a frying pan and then put water in the pan to soak. Soon, they heard a croak. Then, they found ten small frogs (or toads), miraculously arrived out of the arid Nowhere, happily socialising the pan.

Until an expert pronounces, it is not certain whether Cathy’s free-loader is a toad or a frog. Having seen its photo, warts and all, my guess is a toad. Frogs are generally smooth and sleek; this creature is bumpy. I haven’t seen it move but toads clamber, crawl or plop, while frogs always leap or hop.

The arrival of the interloper is in no way Cathy’s fault. Some years ago, I reported that I’d seen an alien beetle crawling across my desk. A bug expert declared it to be a mealworm beetle, aka a Darkling Beetle or Tenebrio molitor.

It had smuggled itself aboard my suitcase when I visited one of my sons living outside London; he keeps exotic lizards which he feeds on mealworms. An egg had developed to larva, to pupa, to beetle. The Darkling species is nocturnal: perhaps it is this characteristic that accounts for the Linnaean name. I remember that Tenebrae, an evening service, was conducted in semi-darkness in the local church when I was a child.

Mealworm beetles have become a pest in the UK, and local councils post instructions for their eradication. I put mine in a plastic bag in the fridge and, when it was torpid, transferred it to the freezer, where it expired.

Inadvertently importing an alien species can happen to anyone. A single Indian toad, escaped into the Irish wild, is unlikely to meet another and produce offspring that will endanger our native habitat or species, but given that mealworm-eating pets are not uncommon — snakes, lizards and so on — Darkling beetles might.

Here, we do not have the common European toad, widespread in Britain and the continent, but we have natterjacks. Their conservation is considered so important that Kerry farmers, around Castlemaine, are given grants for the creation of shallow ponds and other habitat conducive to their survival. Natterjacks may well be more native than we ourselves, having reached here via a land bridge from Britain probably before Neolithic Man. There is a genetic similarity between our natterjacks and those of the small British colonies that survive.

Natterjacks in Ireland predate frogs by millennia. In 1183, Giraldus Cambrensis crossed from Wales with the future King John and wrote an account of Irish natural history, including a paper entitled Of a Frog lately seen in Ireland. The paper may have been propaganda; it told how, soon after the Normans arrived in Ireland, a nobleman showed a frog to an Irish prince and the prince, never having seen a frog, took it as a sign that alien creatures had already reached Ireland and was, thus, demoralised.

(It is unlikely that the term ‘frog’ had become, at that time, a pejorative name for a Frenchman and that Cambrensis was implying that Frenchmen, like frogs, would spread across Ireland.)

It was not until 1696, when a Fellow of Trinity College poured frogspawn from England into a ditch in Phoenix Park, that frogs became an amphibious Irish indigent. It is thought that the Norman nobleman had hidden an English frog in his pocket, and Cambrensis used the story to hoodwink the Irish into accepting that the arrival of new ‘species’ was the natural order.