Horse deaths remain a mystery, performance drugs blamed

Days after 21 horses collapsed and died at a top US Polo competition, no conclusive evidence has been found about what killed the $100,000 dollar animals, but team members of the Venezuelan squad are blaming a vitamin injection boost that was given to the horses.

(Picture: horse and rider at an Australian competition: The Age)

Juan Martin Nero, captain of the Lechuza Caracas team told Buenos Aires newspaper La Nacion that the horses had been given a dose of a French-made vitamin supplement called Biodyl, the Palm Beach Post reported.

“We don’t have any doubts about the origin of the problem,” he said, “There were five horses that weren’t given the vitamin and they are the only ones that are fine.”

Biodyl contains Vitamin B, selenium and chromium, and is commonly given to polo horses to help them recover from exhaustion, according to the Post.

“In general there does not seem to be any high incidence of adverse reactions,” Dr Christie War of the University of Minnesota told the Post, explaining that in normal doses the drug has not harmed horses.

Inside and outside the exclusive world of championship Polo, questions are being asked about how the horses are treated in a sport where there is no testing for performance enhancing drugs.

Palm Beach polo club president JohnWash told CNN that the U.S. Polo Association has been considering drug testing for years.

“People are calling for reform, and maybe that needs to happen, but until toxicology reports come back, and autopsy reports, we don’t even know if [Sunday’s incident is] anything related to that [drugs],” he said.

“I guess everything’s possible…I’ve heard all different rumors. I don’t know if I even want to go there and think about that.”

According to CNN, the Wellington tournament, where the horses died, was one of the top championships in the sport, on a par with the U.S. Opoen in tennis or golf.

“In my day any kind of performance-enhancing drug really wasn’t part of polo,” Dale Smickias, former US national polo team member told the Palm Beach Post.

Meanwhile investigations are continuing at the University of Florida Racing Lab, where drug tests are normally conducted on racehorses.

The Sun-Sentinel reported Tuesday that there was no evidence of foul play, but the horses had been struck by a “mysterious ailment.” It said that University of Florida scientists had found hemorrhaging on the 21 horses, but no explanation was offered.

Scientists have ruled out contagious disease because the animals died so quickly, Mark Fagan, Agriculture Department spokesman told CNN.

“The gross findings did not yield anything that would suggest a specific cause of death,” University of Florida vet school spokeswoman Sarah Carey told the Sun-Sentinal.

More lab-tests will be held on the horses’ water, feed and environment, as well as tissue samples that were taken as the horses lay dying on Sunday.

“Tissues from a live animal can reveal things that are not always able to seen in dead tissue,” said Carey.

21 polo horses die at a US open tournament

Twenty-one horses dropped dead before a polo match Sunday in Florida, but the cause of death is unknown, the Palm Beach Post reported.

(Picture from Horse riding lessons UK)

The horses were all from the same team and died within hours of each other after falling ill and collapsing, “almost certainly of an intoxication of some sort that they consumed,” Lechuza Caracas team vet James Belden told the post.

“I’ve been in the practice 50 years. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Venezuelan team owner Victor Vargas was present at the scene and devastated, according to the International Polo Club president John Wash.

“They had a reaction to something. We don’t know what,” Jimmy Newman, Polo club manager was quoted as saying by the Sun-Sentinel.

The horses were being prepared for a match when some of them started showing signs of dizziness and collapsed, according to the Sun-Sentinel. Four of them died in a transportation trailer as vets and assistants frantically tried to revive the dying animals.

“Some died right away. Others lasted 45 minutes,” a vet said.

The value of the dead horses is estimated at $100,000 each.

Performance enhancing drugs are common at top levels of polo competitions, experts told the Post. Steroid-type drugs are given to horses either mixed in with water or injected directly, they said.

Ant attack on Australia’s poisoned toad infestation

(Photo: University of Sydney)

Australia's reviled cane toads may have met their match in a native species of flesh eating ants, according to a study published last month.

The findings were welcomed by conservationists in Australia eager to rid the land of Bufo marinus, "one of the world's most successful invasive species," according to scientists at the University of Sydney.

The poisonous toads are vulnerable to attack by aggressive meat ants, scientists announced in the British Journal, Functional Ecology.

The report came after researchers observed the one-centimetre long predators attacking baby toads emerging from water.

"The meat ants send workers out from the colony; if they encounter a live baby toad they jump on it," Rick Shine of the University of Sydney told the Australian Broadcasting Company.

"The toad, rather foolishly, tends to just sit there and let itself be ripped to shreds and the workers then carry the bits of toad back to their colony," he said.

The bulky amphibians are vulnerable to the ants, Iridomyrmex reburrus, Shine says, because they haven't developed a fear of their attackers.

His team compared the juvenile invaders' chances against the meat eaters, with that of seven native frog species.

Baby cane toads happily sit out in open areas during the day, unlike native frogs that hide in the bushes, Shine explained.

Reaserchers also raced frogs under laboratory conditions and concluded that the unwelcome invaders were more vulnerable to ant attacks because of their shorter shins and more slothful gait compared to nimble local species.

The ants have not been seen attacking the nocturnal adult toads, which can grow into fat one-kilogram beasts that squirt lethal poison into mouths of larger native predators.

The toads have killed hunters such as crocodiles, snakes and rare marsupial carnivores, and have seriously threatened the balance of native ecosystems, according to researchers at the University of Sydney.

"The ideal way to control toad numbers would be to find a predator that kills and eats toads but leaves native frogs alone," Shine said.

Meat ants are common around tropical pools and streams, according to the Brisbane Times, but the next question is whether they can offer practical help in the battle against the destructive intruders all over Australia.

"The idea would be that we might be able to encourage the meat ants to forage a bit closer to the water's edge during the times when the baby toads are emerging or perhaps even build up ant colonies closer to the edge of the water," Shine said.

But unleashing a new bio-weapon against the intruder is no light matter, he warned.

"We'd obviously have to be pretty careful about that; the story of the cane toad itself is a great example of biological control gone wrong.

The well-documented story of the cane toad in Australia started in 1935 when 101 toads from Hawaii were imported into Queensland for pest control against scarab beetles on sugar cane plantations.

They quickly multiplied to 60,000 in a captive breeding programme before they were released into cane fields, according to BBC science and nature.

Females can lay up to 35,000 eggs at a time, unleashing a plague of Biblical proportions that has reached an approximate population of 200 million today, according to the Canberra Times.

The noxious pests have steadily hopped westwards from Queensland for the past 50 years, with the first toads crossing the Northern Territories boundary into Western Australia earlier in March, according to the Brisbane Times.

“Even slight increases in mortality rates [of cane toadlets] might cause significant reductions in cane toad populations in Australia,'' the study says.