With its flat, flounder-like appearance, triangle-shaped head, and tiny eyes, the Surinam toad doesn’t look like most other toads. It also doesn’t give birth like one.
Photo: ST
Babies emerge from a cluster of tiny holes in their mother’s back, in one of the oddest birth techniques in the animal kingdom.
The strange characteristics don’t end there. These amphibians have long fingers that terminate in four star-shaped sensory lobes, giving rise to its other popular name, star-shaped toad.
Surinam toads are also known as stargazers because to their tiny, lidless eyes perched on top of their heads.
Hunting and diet
As fully aquatic species, Surinam toads live in slow-moving water sources,
Such as rainforest pools and moist leaf litter throughout eastern Trinidad and Tobago and much of the Amazon Basin, including its namesake country, Surinam.
Toads hide from predators and collect crabs, fish, and invertebrates in the water by blending into their surroundings with brownish or olive skin and death-like stillness.
Nocturnal creatures use their sensory organs at their fingertips to detect prey. The animal will then be sucked into their teethless, tongueless mouths or scooped up with their hands.
Mating and reproduction
Males call to females by snapping a bone in their throat, the hyoid, which makes a sound underwater.
When he finds a receptive female, he grasps his arms around her back, a position known as amplexus.
The duo will somersault over the water for hours until the female lays roughly a hundred eggs.
The male fertilizes the eggs, which are subsequently pushed onto her back. A thick layer of skin will form around the eggs, protecting them in honeycomb-like spaces.
