Exploding Toads

I thought this story was a hoax, an urban legend or a belated April Fool's joke:

From The Australian

Toads go out with a bang

Roger Boyes, Berlin

AN outbreak of exploding toads is perplexing residents of Hamburg. The creatures appear to behave quite normally, croaking and snapping up flies. Suddenly, after nightfall, they start to balloon to more than three times their normal size and can barely crawl. They then explode. The toad's entrails are often thrown up to a metre away by the explosion. Thousands of the green amphibians have died this way.

And then I saw the story in the Christian Science Monitor

Over the last few weeks, some thousand toads have come to an explosive end in one particular pond in Hamburg, now known as "the pond of death." And while it seems like tabloid-fodder (the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail did indeed cover it), the story of the bursting batrachians has caught the attention of serious newspapers like the Sunday Telegraph too.

Other stories on BBC , CNN, and a story on MSNBC with a possible explanation.

Crackpot Chronicles has published stories on exploding cell phones, an exploding sauna in Inner Mongolia--but this one takes the cuisses de grenouille!