The Day the Toads Found Me

Toads and I have a long history, usually involving me picking them up for a moment and then setting them back down

Among cat people there is a phenomenon known as the “cat distribution system”. The logic goes that for many cat owners, they never chose their cat. It chose them – dropped off on their doorstep, or by the side of the road, delivered from the mist by some unseen organization that somehow knew which cat to match to which person. It’s a whimsical process, and always heartwarming. I’ll argue that there is another secret web out there. I’m referring, of course, to the toad distribution system.

You’ll immediately have some suspicions. Who the hell has a pet toad? You’re asking yourself. Maybe you’re remembering a particularly funky smelling roommate from college, or ruminating on the habits of medieval witches, who famously kept so many pet toads that they started growing warts from their noses. But I’ll ask for the moment that you suspend your disbelief, and bear witness to how the toads chose me.

I’ve been working at the Bell Museum of Natural History for half a year now, and in most respects it’s a dream job. I get to wander around the museum when I’m fidgeting at my computer, my coworkers are cool people who almost uniformly like bugs, I get paid, and soon might even have health insurance. The only drawback is that I’m inside: in fact, this is the first time ever that I will be working a big-boy indoor job over the summer. Working inside isn’t ideal, especially last week when it was beautiful outside, and there were birds swaying on the tops of the grass stems, and spiderwebs weighed down by dewdrops in the morning, and the toads were calling, nay, screaming from the pond right outside the museum.

When I sent videos of the toads engaged in reproductive behavior to my friends, they called me a frog pervert. Which is totally outrageous because frogs are different than toads. They both eat bugs, sure, but toads sport lumpy poisonous glands on their backs, urinate when they feel upset, and range far overland, only venturing into ponds when it’s time to breed. And in the pond next to the museum, the breeding season was well underway.

Toads in amplexus (reproducing) in the Bell Museum pond. Note the thin black string of eggs

Toads were clasped together, sometimes in knots of three or four, with upstart males trying to shoulder into the party. Vocalizations were pinging across the water, overlapping into a cacophony. And right by the shore, in front of my muddy dress shoes, was where the toads had laid their eggs. There was a great mass of them, gluey spaghetti strands coiled and knotted around shoots of pond grass. The older eggs were already covered in a fine layer of silt, the fresh eggs, completely clear but for a chain of poppy-seed sized toad embryos.

I knew then that the toad distribution system had chosen me. I finished my lunch, rinsed my Tupperware, and filled it with a string of eggs that were already drying out on the muddy shore. They were duds of course. Whether they got too hot, covered in algae, or simply had never been fertilized, my toad eggs did not hatch.

What an excellent opportunity to give up. But the toad distribution system had not yet counted me out (perhaps because unlike the cat distribution system, they have very limited resources and must really put in the work on a specific target. Back in the day when witches were jumping out of every third hedge, they surely wouldn’t have given me another chance, but times have changed). I came back to the pond a few days later, lured by the incessant screeching of the boisterous male toads, to find a thousand tadpoles waiting for me. They almost looked like black mud; they were so numerous. So of course I grabbed a coffee cup, a plastic lid, and captured myself a little afternoon beverage of eight teensy weensy tadpoles.

A coffee cup is obviously not a suitable home for tadpoles, but luckily, I had told my coworker Kat about the situation, and she immediately offered to let me borrow a 20-gallon tank she wasn’t using. It was the perfect deal – the tank was empty, I needed it, and since I was just borrowing it, I could return it in the fall once the tadpoles had pollywogged out of the water and turned into toads. The return of the tank was important because there is nothing more dangerous than having an unused aquarium in the house. It practically demands that some sort of critter inhabit it, and going out and looking for critters is a much riskier process than letting the toad distribution system do its work. Going out and looking is how people end up with pet leeches, cockroaches, hamsters, or other undesirable companions.

So, Kat had the tank for me to borrow, and I hefted it into my 2006 Toyota Prius after work, the tadpoles marinating in their cup, unaware of the plans I had for their 20-gallon palace. I knew that at a minimum I needed to fill it with pond muck and pond water. There was never a situation in which I was going to buy aquarium gravel from the pet store, which not only comes in hideous tropical colors, but is much too smooth to hold the tiny bits of algae and organic material that would feed my tadpoles. I also couldn’t use tap water (chlorinated) or distilled water (too bland), or spring water (actually yes this would’ve worked just fine).

As soon as I got home, pond water plans still brewing, I transferred the tadpoles to a pitcher on the counter, much to the chagrin of two of my roommates, who insisted that it was “unsanitary” and “we wanted to make cocktails in there”. I exercised my Right of Having Bought the Pitcher in the First Place and forged ahead. Kat had also generously lent me a small aerator, so the tadpoles were treated to well-oxygenated air for the first. My third roommate, Isaac, nonplussed about the pitcher situation, agreed to help me gather pond supplies. He agreed mainly because he is a very crafty guy, always building sailboats, furniture, and messes in the kitchen. His temporary unemployment, I’m assured, had nothing to do with it.

Tadpoles thriving in the pitcher

Isaac and I prepared for our pond mission. Net? Check. Bucket? Check. Aquarium tank, large piece of plywood to cover it, and 20-pound weight to hold down the plywood? Check, check, check. Looking back on the ingredients to our misadventure, it seems obvious how things were to go awry. But in the heat of the moment, firmly within the warty grasp of the toad distribution system, everything made sense. There were tadpoles in the pitcher, a pile of supplies in the trunk of the Prius, and a near-blinding mission lodged within both my heart and Isaac’s. We needed to make these toads a home.