MAY WE RECOMMEND--
Tadpole Taste

Items that merit a trip to the library

by Stephen Drew, AIR staff

"On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica," Richard Wassersug, The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9. (Thanks to Sally Shelton and R. Wassersug for bringing this to our attention.) The author, who is now at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, reports:

The standardized tasting procedure included several steps. A tadpole was rinsed in fresh water. The taster placed the tadpole into his or her mouth and held it for 10-20 sec without biting into it. Then the taster bit into the tail, breaking the skin and chewed lightly for 10-20 sec. For the last 10-20 sec the taster bit firmly and fully into the body of the tadpole. The participants were directed not to swallow the tadpoles but to spit them out and to rinse their mouths out at least twice with fresh water before proceeding to the next tadpole.

Note: This paper won for it's author the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in biology. Richard Wassersug traveled to Harvard University where he accepted the Prize from several Nobel Laureates and delivered an acceptance speech.

© Copyright 2000 Annals of Improbable Research (AIR)

This item first appeared in the AIRhead Research Review column in AIR vol. 6, no. 5. For a list of other HotAIR featured items, see What's New.