Have you ever had one of those moments when you dwell on something and you wish you could stop thinking about it - but the more you try to stop thinking, the more it slithers back into your mind? I’ve been having one of those moments for a while now. I found myself awake at three in the morning staring at the lazily turning fan on my ceiling, wondering what it was I was doing awake, when it crawled back into my thoughts. You see, I’ve been dwelling on toads -- Surinam Toads, specifically -- and my back has been itching for days.
I don’t get the willies too often but if I had to name an animal that creeps me out, it’s the Surinam Toad. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with dangerous animals. Vancouver Island, where I live, has one of the highest densities of cougars in the world and also leads in human/cougar encounters. I’ve had my own personal encounters with grizzly bears in Montana, I’ve scuba dived with sharks in Belize, and I survived driving in Boston (where the other cars, I suspect, are all driven by hungry wolves looking for easy meals of college kids from small towns). Yet, I’ve never been to South America and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because that’s where it lives.
It is an aquatic toad that hangs out in the muddy backwaters of the Amazon region of South America. The Surinam Toad (which is also called by its frightfully evil taxonomic genus and species name of Pipa pipa) can grow to be up to 8 inches long and in no way poses a threat to humans. However, it is rather an ugly animal. It's flat and rather rectangular, about the size of a videotape (a good picture of it is here). The naturalist Gerald Durrell described a large female as "looking---as all pipa toads look in repose---as though she had been dead for some weeks and was already partially decomposed."[1] The Pipa pipa's square, mottled brown, flat shape that gives it (apparently for camouflage reasons) the appearance of a dead leaf, or, as other people have observed, a toad that has been stepped on.[2]
It’s not the Pipa pipa’s appearance that creeps me out but rather its love life. Actually, its love life is not scary at all (I saw worse mating rituals when I did, uh, field research at frat parties my freshman year of university…shudder). During amplexus, the two toads perform underwater somersaults like leaves blowing in the wind. Rather, it’s what happens after the lovin’ that I lay awake last night thinking about.
The female lays about 60 to 100 eggs that are fertilized by the male and then distributed over the female's back. The eggs stick to the back, and sink into the soft flesh there. Within a day, the mother’s back flesh will swell and grow over the eggs. In about ten days, the eggs will be completely imbedded in a honeycomb on the mother’s back. In each of the chambers of the honeycomb, the eggs develop into very small but more or less fully formed frogs. In about 12 to 20 weeks, the baby toads push out of the skin covering their chamber not unlike, I imagine, the alien in the Alien movie. Only times 60.
If that doesn’t itch -- toads wriggling and squirming as they burrow out of your back -- I don’t know what does.
Okay, I don’t really have any phobia’s about the Pipa pipa and I can actually appreciate that it is a fascinating animal. However, every since I learned about it in my school days (I was a bio major), I can’t help thinking about it whenever my back itches. I guess I should be thankful, that I’m not a female Surinam Toad, because I can usually scratch my back. I feel sorry for the Pipa pipa - there’s a reason that O’Reilly Publishing put it on the cover of their Window Annoyances book – because, really, what could be more annoying than having a hundred offspring forming and bursting out of your back (well, maybe using Windows ME, I guess).
Right now, though, I have a bug bite in a area I can’t reach and Jen’s out of town and I’ve got toads on my mind. Here’s a good gallery from the Honolulu Zoo of a Pipa pipa’s back. I warn, you though, look at it at your own risk – because if you do, you’ll be buying a back scratcher tomorrow.
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[1] This quote comes from the Pipa pipa Primer, which in turn got it from:
Durrell, Gerald, 1954. Three Tickets to Adventure. Berkley Publishing Corp., New York, NY
2] The "stepped on" description comes from the Wikipedia entry on Surinam Toads. No more specific attribution was available.
