Creature Encounter: Spadefoot Toad
Our FrogWatch USA monitoring team struck gold the other night during a field session at Newport News State Park, Va. After several years of hoping and wishing, we finally found an Eastern Spadefoot Toad (Scaphiopus holbrookii)!
The spadefoot toad is a remarkable find for our chapter. While it is a fairly common amphibian, its lifestyle makes this toad nearly impossible to find without perfect conditions. They are extremely fossorial, and spend just about all of their life underground, leaving their burrows only briefly to mate. Heavy rains (like those of the past week) cause them to emerge in large numbers, at nearly any point in the year, and they congregate at ephemeral pools created by the rain and breed explosively before returning to their burrows. A single female may lay up to 2,500 eggs at a time, and tadpoles may metamorphose into toadlets in as little as 28 days. But these perfect conditions are not especially common, and spadefoot toads often go many years without these reproductive events. So this was a huge deal for us!
Spadefoot toads are immediately recognizable thanks to a couple unique traits. The first is their eyes, which have elliptical pupils (vertical like a cat), rather than the horizontal pupils of other frogs and toads. Below you can compare the eyes of a spadefoot toad (top) and American toad (bottom).
The second trait is their namesake: a dark spade on their hind legs. The spade is an adaptation of their fossorial lifestyle, and gives the toad a competitive edge when it comes to burrowing.
Unfortunately for us, this little guy wasn't calling for a mate, and since FrogWatch USA relies on breeding calls for data collection, we will be unable to include our observation in the national database. Regardless, this is still a HUGE find for our chapter, and does confirm the presence of spadefoot toads in this particular area. We only found one this year, but now that we know where to look, perhaps we will find a larger breeding population in the near future!
Whoa! Sooo cool! I always wished I'd seen a spadefoot while I was in Louisiana. Awesome find!
Great post @herpetologyguy, you are such a wealth of interesting information about animals.
Thank you! Glad I can pass it on!
Frogs are edible,Toads are poisonous................
That is often true, yes, but be careful of generalizations like that. Some toads are relatively harmless and some frog species have enough toxin to kill several adults!
i will,thanks for the heads up