(whooshing sound)
- [Announcer] The federally endangered Houston Toad
lives in three central TxDOT districts.
When road construction projects are underway in those areas,
specially-designed toad exclusion fences
are used as part of the effort
to make sure the Houston Toad can't enter those work zones.
Researchers with Texas Agrilife Research
and Texas A&M Transportation Institute
developed unique ways to study the fencing system.
- The project was the assessment of our AREF,
or amphibian and reptile exclusion fence.
TxDOT had started some years ago
with what we called toad exclusion Fence, TEF,
but in this project and in the evolution,
we've expanded it to be focused not just on Houston Toads.
It's been expanded now for statewide use,
including development of a specification
of this amphibian reptile exclusion fence.
- We're testing three different types of fences,
including the TxDOT amphibian and reptile exclusion fence,
as well as two commercially available fences.
And so we built this arena
with several different configurations
of these three types of fencing.
We have some barrier kind of configurations
to see if the toads can escape
out of a barrier configuration.
And we have jump out configurations
in which the toads are supposed to be able to escape.
In the field, this would mean that the barrier
would be around a construction zone,
so toads could not actually get
into those construction zones,
and if they were in the construction zone,
we'd want the jump out configuration
to allow them to escape.
- Our expertise is in materials.
You know, we traditionally test materials
for erosion and settlement control
and so with our expertise in installing materials,
that's what we did for this project.
We were responsible for installing, maintaining
and then removing the materials once the study was finished.
- We decided to use the Gulf Coast Toad as a proxy species
so that we would not be handling Houston Toads.
So we use the proxy species, a very common species
called the Gulf Coast Toad, incilius nebulifer,
and we collected a bunch of them
and ran about 10 cohorts of 18 toads and they experienced
each of the six different configurations,
so three fences, barrier and jump out,
so that's six configurations.
- The concept is to exclude Houston Toads
from construction areas.
So we go in, we survey ahead of time,
we put down this barrier, the exclusion fence,
and then it's a safe work zone
without having to constantly monitor
and pay attention to the Houston Toads.
- Our results are not final, but we've found so far
that the TxDOT amphibian and reptile exclusion fence
was designed appropriately.
It does exclude toads and it works as a barrier.
- The benefit that this project does
is it's validated what was a TxDOT method.
It's compared it to some of the other
commercially available products and shown its effectiveness,
both in excluding snakes and toads from.