Ologies with Alie Ward - Smologies #3: TOADS with Priya Nanjappa

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

Ohaaay another edited-down, classroom-friendly Smologies! About... toads! Are they frogs? Do they have arms? What do they eat? How long do they live? What’s with the warts? Amphibian enthusiast Priya Nanjappa joins with a toadally awesome episode that will change the way you crouch down and shake hands with your tiny backyard grumpa.(And for the full version with NSFW stories, the link is below.)New full-length episodes of Ologies drop Tuesdays, and new Smologies come out every other Thursday.More Smologies episodesFull uncut episode of BufologyFollow Priya on Twitter or InstagramA donation was made to The Amphibian & Reptile ConservancySponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, pins, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Zeke Thomas Rodrigues & Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media and Steven Ray MorrisSmologies theme song by Harold Malcolm

Oh hey, it's the dog in the back seat of the car next to you. Allie Ward, back with episode three of Smology's right-sized classroom-friendly versions of our deep-dive oligies classics. And this one makes me so hoppy, because totes get it hoppy. Are totes the unsung underdogs? Are they warty friends yet to be made? Do they belong in a heap of cancelled beasts who don't deserve our admiration? You'll find out.

Okay, bufology. Let's go down a toad hole. So bufology is a word that I did not make up, although it's seldom cited, to be fair. A 2011 Reptile Magazine article titled, Oh to a Toad, uses the term bufology 101, so I'm going with it. There's also herpetology, which is reptiles and amphibians. There's batracticology, which is the subfield that is just amphibians, which I may have pronounced wrong.

But what if I want to do a frog episode down the line, or one on newts? So I'm going bufology, because it exists. People use it sometimes. Also its root is bufo, a Latin for toad, which may come from a word meaning slimy plant. Or it may also come from bufare, meaning to puff up. And buffoonery is a related word. It's debatable, like toads for some people. Speaking of people, get ready to hear a scientist passionately describe a love of toads.

She's so human, I cherish her. She was once the program manager for the Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies, where she also served as a national coordinator for partners in amphibian and reptile conservation. She worked as a biological science technician for the USGS, the US Geological Survey, and now works in the nonprofit ecology sector at Conservation Science Partners, but is still in the field a bit, out toting and salamandering and frogging and nuding. So hop on into a conversation with amphibian enthusiast and bufologist Priya Ninjapa. Okay, but what makes a toad a toad?

Straight away, what is the difference between a frog and a toad? Okay, so generally speaking, most frogs have like smooth skin. They tend to need a closer association with water or aquatic environments. And then the toads that we traditionally know, you know, with the big kind of stout fat bodies and the warts and everything, they typically can be away from water longer and they don't need as much of that sort of direct moisture the way that frogs do. And then they also secrete these toxins from their skin. Really?

Yeah, and so like that's the biggest thing. There are some frogs that do that as well, but pretty much all toads have some sort of gland, you know, that they secrete and they secrete some sort of bufotoxin. And so... Bufotoxin. Bufotoxin, that's what it's called. Such a good punk band. Right?

Yeah. Bufotoxin. Is their skin thicker? And what exactly are the warts? Are they air quartz warts? That's a good question. These warts on toads are associated with these. They have mucus glands and granular glands, but the granular glands are the ones that

are responsible for the toxic secretions. Oh, and it's for an anti-predator defense so that when anything grabs it, it just tastes bad and they spit it out, you know, or sometimes they'll get sick. Some of the toads produce some pretty strong toxins. So all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads. Oh, I love those. It's the old cactus succulent. Yes.

Like all cactus are succulents, not all succulents are cacti. Yes, exactly. All right. And like in the amphibian world, there's like nudes, you know, like all nudes are salamanders, not all salamanders are nudes, and nudes are to salamanders like toads are to frogs kind of early lineages of toads are, they look more frog like. And so like over time, those different features, the more like stout bodies and bigger warts and glands and things like that appear kind of later in evolutionary history.

They came after frogs. So somewhere in that like Cretaceous Cenozoic period, they've been around. So to recap, toads are frogs and toads have no teeth. Yes, for warts, they've got a poison gland behind their eye called a paratoid gland. I thought to have been like an adrenal gland just gone bonkers. Oh, and another souped up special feature not available on the standard frog model. And then the other really weird thing is that toads have this thing called the bitters organ. Okay.

Which sits like kind of between the kidneys and the gonads. And I think both males and females have them, but they're thought to be like a primitive ovary. Why? Why? Or like it's kind of like a spare set of follicles, but the males have it too. And so like in experiments in the lab, they've removed the testes. And all of a sudden this bitters organ like is like, oh, okay, time for me to come into

play and then like it starts forming eggs. How long have toads had a place in her life and her heart? I remember my first toad sighting, which was in my mom's garden in Iowa. And it just would like hop along the tomato plants and eat things. And like eventually we figured out that we could build a little toad hut like out of a pot, you know, and just put that in there. And it would just, you know, go and hang out. And I was so sad on the days when I didn't see it.

Like I'm sure it was all seasonal, but I don't remember, you know, the specifics of it. And I do remember other people's houses where there'd be one like sitting under the gutter, eating the flies and stuff like that. And I liked other critters too, but there was something about the toads that I just kept coming back to that I just kept like, I don't know, I just love them. They're just, they just have that face, you know, it's just that face. I love that you had a toad friend. Like the toad was your friend.

It kind of was my friend. Are the males bigger than the females? The females are bigger than the males. Oh, by a lot. Yeah, by a lot. Yes. Oh. Yeah.

Usually by quite a bit. Oh, and both have tympanums to hear sound, such as, for example, the romantic, screamy love ballads man toads make by inflating an air sack, like a big extra chin, kind of like having a subwoofer on your face. So another thing that's really cool about toads is they have all like a lot more bony material on their skull, like their, or their skulls are like highly ossified. And those crests and the shape of those crests and stuff are what you can use to distinguish species when they are like in the same area.

And you have a lot of similar looking little brown toads with warts other than the warts per spot. Certain species. Yeah. No, it's, yeah, it's warts per spot. So like in the like dark brown spot, there'll be like two or three warts if it's an American toad. And then if it's a Fowler's toad or something or Woodhouse's toad, they'll have more in

each like dark spot. And then there's like the shape of the peritoid glands, which are the things that produce like behind their eyes that produce that more of the toxic secretion. And then those little crests and bosses and ridges and everything, that's how they differentiate themselves. But yeah. So they have these really cool skulls. Frogs don't have that.

So next time you see a toad, absolutely okay to say, Hey, what's up? Your skull looks totally cool. But where can you see a toad? Are toads on all continents? Everywhere except Australia, which right now is only being overrun by the invasive cane toad. Oh, really? Yes.

Australia got a got a little bit ripped off on the toad card and then they got payback. And then they got, yeah, kind of, yeah. And they didn't used to be on Madagascar either, but now there's a different toad that is found on Madagascar that's also super invasive and yeah, wreaking havoc. So yeah, unfortunately, the toads that are finding their way to places where they never were like the ones you just don't want to be there. Okay, let's loop around back real quick and talk about cane toads. Shall we?

Okay, great. So these are these huge toads. They're also called marine toads, even though they're terrestrial, but the largest recorded one measured over nine inches long. They look like holding a big leathery pretzel roll, but with legs. They eat everything from like live bats, sometimes plants to bugs to dead animals to just straight up garbage, sometimes just literal actual garbage. Another reason we love toads, they're not too picky.

Can you ever have too many toads now in some places, perhaps like those so-called marine but actually terrestrial toads in Australia, the cane toads. Why are they there? So I think it's like where they were growing sugar cane, they had brought them there to control like the bugs, you know, that were eating the sugar cane. And then of course, you know, anytime you bring a thing to control the thing that you don't want, then that thing goes, you know, crazy. So there are these big beefy marine toads and so they can live, they can tolerate like

saltwater environments, but they also apparently can live all over the place. Does Priya have a favorite toad? Yes. She has a soft spot. She has a soft warty spot for American toads because they were the first she saw in the Midwest, but she did clarify that they no longer belong to the Bufo genus. North American toads are now classified anaxiris, which sounds like a very cool rebrand. If you ask me, Bufo versus anaxiris reminds me of the time my girlfriend, Ben, wanted

us to call him Sebastian with an E on the end, but unlike anaxiris, it didn't stick. I'm sorry, Sebastian. They're a little bit fatter and their eyes are just a little bit more like bulbous. So I really kind of fell in love with them, but there's some really pretty toads too. Like in the Southwestern US, there are these green toads and then these red spotted toads. And especially in South America, like I haven't seen like all the Bufanan species, you know, that are down there. I mean, it would take, you know, millions of years.

There's so many species of toads all over the world, but they are really diverse and interesting. P.S., how many species of toad are out there hopping around and frowning? It's over 600. And some look like dead leaves with a face and some are beautiful rainbow colors. Some we haven't even discovered yet right now. Just kicking it in a hollow, I think. Is that where toads live?

Do they live in toad hollows? Do they live in little like cardboard spots and trees and stuff? Yeah. Well, pretty much in burrows of different sorts. Some of them can do a little bit of digging, but a lot of times they'll live in other, you know, mammal burrows and things like that. Do toads ever get chilly? They don't freeze.

Like some frog species can totally freeze in the winter. Like they produce this antifreeze, but toads don't do that. They just go underground, like below the frost line, where it's just warm enough that they can survive through the winter and they hibernate, but they don't freeze. So they just live underground. Don't freeze? That's handy. Oh, speaking of hands, true or false, toads have arms.

Yes, they do. Okay. Thank you. I don't feel like toads have four legs. I feel like they have two legs and two arms. They do. Toads have arms. They do have arms.

I mean, they're like little Popeye arms, right? Like couldn't you just see a little tattoo on those little forearms? They're so fat and the males have fatter forearms on purpose like to clutch arms. Clutch. Yeah, they have arms. Okay. Thank you. You will see it like in different places and references about their arms and like how

they... Really? So is that official? I'm going to say it is. Priya has done a lot of work with a lot of amphibians, namely salamanders, but her field work helping collect toad data made her love them even more. Just a little ways into the season, the toads would come in and they would just be everywhere and they were just so fun to watch.

The eggs were everywhere and then the tadpoles would be everywhere and there's probably at least a couple of sites where there probably was close to 100 toads. We definitely saw a lot of them just out and about and just hopping along. Are they solitary or do they burrow with friends, do you think? I think there are some records of them like in sharing burrows with other toads and we actually found a multiple species like hibernaculum, but I do think that there are toads that will share the same types of burrows and then there are some places where the soil is really sandy and they can just kind of shimmy down under the sand, especially in the more hotter environments

because in a lot of places in the southern US, both east and west, they're active pretty much here around. They don't really have much of a hibernation, but you know, in the northern areas they do. Do they sleep? I don't know. Yeah. Do they sleep? They do.

They do sleep. I've never seen a sleeping toad. Yeah. I haven't seen a sleeping toad. Are they nocturnal or are they out in the day? When they first come out, it's usually during the day and they will just be singing their little hearts out like all during the day and then they kind of shift to just calling at night so you don't really hear them during the day, but you'll see them out there sometimes.

We definitely like when we'd go out in the field to our sites during the daytime, we would see the toads just everywhere and they weren't always calling by that point, but then if you came to the same pond that night, you know, they would just be singing like crazy. Yeah. And so it's cool. Oh, listen to these beautiful sounds. Ah, so relaxing and soothing.

Now let's hear something both cute and horrifying. Toads oozing out of your skin, well, their mom's skin. Okay. What type of toad where the baby toads are birthed from holes in the back or is was that an American horror story? No, no, those are, those are a different family. So they're not Bufanids. They're not true toads.

They are called like the Suriname toad and yeah, that, oh man, that's like the craziest like reproductive strategy. They'll lay the eggs and they'll be fertilized and then they like scoop them up with their legs onto their back and then their back, like the chemistry of the skin changes and it basically like absorbs the eggs into their back and then the skin grows over the back over the top of it and then when they get ready to hatch, they hatch out as like little live, it's not even tadpoles, it's like little live baby toads and they just start cracking out of the mom's back.

What is the state of the toad these days? How are toads? Do they need us? Do they hate us? I know that cane toads are having a heyday right now. It's the, it is the era of the cane toad, but how in general are toads faring these days? So some of the species of toads have been hit pretty hard by the chytrid fungus, the

amphibian chytrid fungus, patrachycytrium dendrobatidus, or BD for short. In Central America especially, there's a couple of the adelopis genus species that have, that are thought to be extinct. There's a golden toad that's in the encilis genus from Costa Rica that is, it was like their iconic toad species and they think that that's extinct. I think there's, they've found like maybe a couple of individuals here and there of all of these different species, but yeah, but they're, they've gone extinct and it's because of this fungus, this fungal pathogen.

So have you heard of like white nose and bats? So this actually came before and then like the people in the white nose world like learned from that, but it took the BD world, the amphibian world, like a really long time to figure out that it was this fungal pathogen. It was described as a new species once they figured out that that's what it was. But it's been responsible for, well, it's questionable, but there's, there's a recent paper that says that there's like 500 species that have declined throughout the world on that because of BD, but there's some question about that a little bit.

So at least most people say like around like 200 or so species that have declined or gone extinct specifically because of the impacts of BD. And in the US in particular, some of our toad species have been the ones that have been most impacted. What are the predators of toads? Oh, there are various birds and snakes that will eat toads. Hognose snakes are kind of toad specialists. The toxin doesn't seem to bother them, so they're able to manage with them.

But crows, which are super smart, as you know, will like eviscerate toads and then just eat their gooey insides. Yeah, that's what I do with airport sandwiches. I just eat the middle. But before I ask the questions that you submitted patrons, a few sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to make a donation each week to a cause of the oligarchs choosing. And this week, PREA requested a donation be made to the amphibian and reptile conservancy to support inclusivity and diversity in amphibian and reptile

conservations. So thank you, PREA. Okay, sponsors. All right, we're back. Your questions. Okay, Jack Kelleher asked, life cycle of a toad, same as similar to a frog, or do they live longer or shorter than a frog, do you think? Oh, well, I think it depends on the species.

Um, and you know, some frogs live pretty long, some, some toads live pretty long, but, but, you know, kind of on average in that sort of five ish, seven ish, you know, 10 ish range of years, but life cycle. Yeah, very, fairly similar to a frog cause, you know, they are frogs. They are a frog. Yeah. So they will like mostly be on land until it's breeding season, you know, or like be hibernating or whatever.

And then they'll come to the ponds for that breeding season. They'll call, attract their mate. Um, there are some toads that don't call and they're, oh my God, I can't there are some toads that will do that leg waving thing. You know, have you ever seen that? Oh my God, you have to. Yeah. So they like in these like stream environments where it's so loud because

of all this stream noise, they have evolved this, like they just, they literally take their back leg and they just like go like this. Priya, by the way, is laying on the hotel room bed, doing a move that looks like part synchronized swimming, but also part shipwreck victim. And I think in some of them it's their front leg maybe too, but they anyway, or their arm, yeah. And they, they just like, they're like, Hey, I'm over here. Oh my God, like hailing a cab.

Yes. And then some, you know, chick toad is walking by and just like, oh, oh, okay. I never knew that they did that. Yeah. So there are, so anyway, I kind of digress there. But yeah, so generally speaking, they attract their mate, the mate, you know, the female comes over and they, you know, they lay their eggs and mostly, most of the species like lay a lot of eggs and maybe you'll have a pretty decent amount

of the eggs that will hatch into tadpoles. But then like the tadpoles are food for all sorts of stuff. Oh my God. Have you ever seen like all the little toadlets popping out? Are they really called toadlets? Yes. Oh God. Toadlets.

Heather Albrecht says, what are toad communities like? I always see toads on the ground blazing their own trails. But then there's always another little guy not too far away. Do they reconvene at the end of the day in communal housing? If they survived my lawnmower or do they battle it out for prime resources? Do they have friends? They all come together for the breeding season, but they're not really like friendly, you know, they're like all competing during that time.

And it is true that you do tend to see them together. And I think that is probably because they, they must like hang out together wherever they're overwintering or hanging out during the hot months or something. Laura Kinney wants to know, do toads travel far from their burrow or wherever whatever a toad home is called to forage or find a mate? How is their commute? What's a toad commute like? You know, I think generally speaking, they're thought to be not

that they don't move that far. But there was recently one of my colleagues in Utah was tracking these Western toads. And found that they moved like five or six miles, which, you know, a toad that hops like that's a long way like between where their breeding site was and where they I think were hanging out like in the winter, because they'll go back to the same ponds where they merged to go breed. And so when those habitats got fewer and far between, like if they went back and their pond that they know was not there, they'll usually just go a little

bit further until they find the next thing. And so probably like over time, these animals have developed the ability to go that far. And especially the ones in these montane habitats, you know, like there are a lot fewer areas, you know, and a lot more ground to traverse between ponds. That was one that I remember was like pretty striking. Like I just learned that a couple of years ago that those particular ones were able to do that.

And I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in the literature that suggests that they go that far. Do they have a homing device? How are they finding the same ponds? Yeah, I think they believe it's a little bit both like astrological as well as chemo sensory and they're able to like, you know, smell their home ponds basically and go back. Yeah, that's that's true of a lot of amphibians in general.

Like they tend to go back to the same and actually a lot of reptiles as well. Like they'll they'll kind of they have sight fidelity. Do you have a favorite thing? The one thing about a toad that you love the most or about your job as a herper? Oh, what is my favorite thing about a toad? I don't know. There's just I just I just love their little bodies, their little that classic

toad shape and just the little hop and the face, you know, just that little classic toad face. So there you have it. Toads have cute faces and little arms and they are our friends. Thank you for being my friend, Smologites, and for listening. New Smologies episodes are out every other Thursday and you can find them all together at alleyward.com slash Smologies. That will be linked in the show notes along with the credits because we keep

these short. But before I go, I share a tidbit of advice from a lady who calls herself Dad Ward. That's me. And my advice is to make stuff. The best way to get good at something is to do it. So if you want to be a poet or a painter or a paleontologist, write and build and draw and dance and read and do experiments and just get in the game. Don't be afraid to mess up because as long as you're doing your learning and

that is not messing up. Okay, Smologites. Bye bye. Smologies. Smologies. Smologies. Smologies.