| New Site | Old Home | Search | Communities | Counties | Southeast | Southwest | |
 |
| |
| ||||||||||||
Spadefoots and termites
Last updated on Wednesday, January 01, 2003
While transplanting wildflowers one hot afternoon, I slid my spade under the roots of an evening primrose, and carefully lifted it up. A small, mottled toad hopped out from the hole. Startled, I jumped. It sat still, blinking in the bright light, its cat-like eyes showing horizontal pupils. Those eyes and its silver-dollar-size gave away the small amphibian's identity: a spadefoot toad.
Spadefoot toads are named for their "spades," black, sharp-edged scrapers on the underside of each hind leg near their hind foot. Like many desert residents, these small amphibians take refuge in the soil to escape both drought and extreme temperatures. Unlike most, however, spadefoots spend the majority of their lives - years, in extreme droughts - dug deep in the earth, barely respiring, dormant. Since spadefoots literally dehydrate when exposed to dry air, they emerge only on a handful of nights each year when water is briefly abundant during the summer monsoon season. Their sudden appearance and equally abrupt disappearance raises many questions. For instance, what do they eat?
Spadefoot toads are not the only desert-dwellers to emerge en masse following the summer rains. The brief profusion of water also triggers the hatching or emergence of a variety of insects, including termites, one of the toads' major foods. Several species of termites stage massive mating flights at dusk during the summer rains, providing a feast for the toads. But the toads' window of opportunity is small. The termite alates - the winged, reproductive stage - fly from their parent colony, alight on the soil, shed their wings and mate. Only in the short time that the now-wingless termites are running about on the ground surface searching out a good location to dig a burrow are they vulnerable to the sticky tongues of spadefoot toads. And, although thousands of termites appear in each flight, just a few flights occur per year in any one place.
Termite alates are the toad equivalent to Dove bars. They contain more fat and calories than some 200 other species of insects analyzed by scientists and they provide much more energy per unit weight than other toad foods like adult beetles or crickets. The toads gorge themselves on the rich insects, eating as much as half their body weight in one night's feeding, and storing so much fat that after just a few nights of feeding, they can survive for a year or more underground.
No termites flew on the afternoon that I inadvertently unearthed the spadefoot toad. It was hot and dry, not a good time for a toad to be out in the air. Concerned that the small toad would dehydrate, I herded it carefully back into the hole, watered it with the watering can, covered it with damp soil, and wished for it many rainy summer nights, with plenty of termites to eat.
|
||||||||||||