Toads

This week saw one of the most memorable events of spring around here - the annual return of toads to their breeding ponds and the ensuing cacophony of croaking and orgy of mating that follows. They arrived in their hundreds, crawling out of the woods and over the wet grass to reach the pond where they grew up as toadpoles.

Some just floated on the pond surface, while....

.... others lurked underwater, but all had just one thing on their mind ...

.... finding something to mate with - and this one was so desperate that it tried to mate with my camera.

Somewhere in this writhing mass of toads there'll be a female.

This cluster slowly rotated in the pond for over an hour .... females are sometimes drowned by the lust-crazed males.

At one point this ball of toads had around eighteen individuals clambering over one another. This must surely be one of the most remarkable displays of blind instinct in British natural history. I saw a group of four toads trying to mate with a reed mace seed head that was floating in the water.

Many years ago, mooching around in a second-hand bookshop, I found a copy of Thomas Bell’s A History of Reptiles, published in 1849 when toads were still classified as reptiles. It provides some fascinating early insights into the life of these amphibians. Part of Bell’s purpose was to “shrew that it is.... highly useful, perfectly harmless, inoffensive, and even timid, and susceptible to no inconsiderable degree of discriminating attachment to those who treat it with kindness”, counteracting what he refers to as “undeserved persecution as the victims of an absurd and ignorant prejudice.... Condemned by common consent as a disgusting, odious, and venomous reptile, the proverbial emblem of all that is malicious and hateful in the human character....”.

This is one of the book's wood engravings. Bell provides a delightful description of a toad feeding: “The Toad, when about to feed, remains motionless, with its eyes turned directly forward upon the object, and the head a little inclined towards it, and in this attitude it remains until the insect moves; when, by a stroke like lightning, the tongue is thrown forward upon the victim, which is instantly drawn into the mouth.”

There are numerous old accounts of toads being found alive embedded in the wood of trees or even inside rocks (like the account you can read here), no doubt poorly observed instances of these animals hibernating under rotten logs and under rocks, and Bell describes some cruel experiments that were performed by early naturalists to prove that entombed toads could survive, including artificially embedding them in balls of hard clay or plaster of Paris ...... all of which inevitably led to the death of the toad.

Bell clearly liked toads and provides an account of how toads are easy to tame, citing his own pet toad that would "sit on one of my hands, and eat from the other..."
























He also dispelled the myth that they are poisonous to humans - a long-standing misconception which you sometimes still hear repeated today. At one time it was believed that their bite, their breath and even a glance from those fiery orange eyes could strike you dead. Bell described how there are glands on their back that secrete an acrid liquid that deters predators, but that’s the limit of their toxicity. Bell went on to record how a Dr. John Davy investigated this secretion: “....... a thick yellowish fluid, which on evaporation yields a transparent residue, very acrid, and acting on the tongue like extract of aconite. It is neither acid nore alkaline; and since a chicken inoculated with it received no injury, it does not appear to be noxious when absorbed and carried in the circulation.”
You can see the glands in question - called paratoid glands in the photo above, showing up as the orange-hued ridges behind the eye.


Footnote: Thomas Bell, more than just a footnote in history.

Thomas Bell, a dentist by profession and author of A History of British Reptiles, was a remarkable individual. His personal researches into natural history were so admired that he became Profesor of Zoology at King's College London and he identified the reptile and crustacean species that Darwin brought back from his voyage on HMS Beagle, affirming that the giant tortoises were native to the Galapagos Islands and had not been taken there by pirates - a finding that was later to prove important in Darwin's interpretation of the way in which these reptiles had speciated on the islands. You can read more about him here.
Photo source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Zoologist_Thomas_Bell.jpg

Footnote: Batrachomyomachia

















As with so many natural history books of the period, Bell’s account of the amphibians concludes with a charming tailpiece wood engraving, in this case of a battle between mice and frogs (double-click for a larger image).

It depicts the scene in a Greek poem sometimes said to have been written by Homer (unlikely, apparently) and probably dating from the fifth century BC, called Batrachomyomachia. In the story (there are numerous variations) a frog offers a mouse a ride on its back around its watery habitat but is frightened by a snake, dives underwater and the mouse is drowned. The tragedy is seen by a fellow mouse and a war, that lasts just one day, is fought between the mice and frogs. The goddess Athena calls on Zeus to quell the fighting using thunderbolts (i.e. an air-strike) but that fails and instead she sends an army of crabs (i.e. sends in the heavy armour) to quell the disturbance. You can read a translation of the poem here.