Found this poor guy belly up in the pool. The Pic does not do justice. He is a good 10 inches long and weighs a good 3 to 4 LBS. Around here know as the Sonoran Desert Toad. How the heck those things can live and grow in the desert baffles me. They are toxic if eaten and can make any animal that tries to eat them ill or even die. That along with two rattlers in the yard and number one dog snake bit again. Fun in the desert.
That's a bigun, Jim.
When young, I used to skim my parents' pool. I hated to find the toads who didn't survive overnight. They are a major part of insect control.
I recall one year at Christmas time when we were camping in the snow and back packing up above Idylwild (High above Palm Springs) in SOCAL when rain drove us out of the snow country and we went to Death Valley to dry out. We slept on the ground and before going to sleep we saw the largest toads we had ever seen on the loose. I have seen several rather large plaster of Paris toads used as doorstops but never anything of that size alive in the wild.
Anyway these toads were HUGE, at least as large as what you have in the picture and I think larger. We estimated the length of a sitting toad at 12 inches. They didn't hop long distances while we watched just sort of meandered around the base of some oleanders eating bugs. We were surprised to see huge toads in Death Valley and speculated as to how they cold survive the heat.
Do you think maybe they are the same as your pictured toad?
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Yep same toad. They go by several names. Gila river toad, Colorado river toad, ect but basically the same toad. They really only move about during the rainy season unless they have some sort of water near by. In the desert after the summer rains dry up they dig down into the sand and hibernate until it rains again. I have been told they can hibernate for several years if necessary. Not sure that is true or not. I have a stock thank that only holds water for a few months and I regularly take dirt out of it for other purposes and every tractor bucket usually has two or three toads in it.
After the first good rain of the monsoon season (usualy July) when the tanks first gets some water in it the silly things will dig out of the ground and make one heck of a racket for several nights.
You can actually buy the darn things. Not sure why.
http://www.bouncingbearbotanicals.co...oad-p-368.html
Holy moley those things are selling for $150 each. I better start catchin and selling em for half that.
And dang it appears that people actually milk the venom and then smoke it to get high. Ain't no way I will ever be a dope head.
Jim, Thanks man. Yeah, if you have that many of them you could add toad breeder to your resume. They are so hardy and sort of "power down" with no water available so they would be dead easy to ship to youir customers. Less muss and fuss would be to contact stores with significant sales of lizards, snakes, and such and offer them wholesale quantities and rates.
The ones we saw in Death Valley at Christmas time were at a camp ground (don't recall which) and were eating bugs, I thought. There was a row of relatively dense oleander bushes (popular institutional planting in California) with lighting from a building on one side and shade on the other. We slept on the ground in the shade of the oleanders to avoid the light shining in our eyes so much. The toadus gigantus (OK, I made that up) were working the bushes.
Arizona Highways blurb - - The Sonoran Desert toad (Bufo alvarius), also known as the Colorado River toad, is the largest native toad in the United States, and can be up to seven inches long.
UP TO SEVEN INCHES???? Hmmm must have been all those industrial and ag chemicals and radiation...
This link also claims snout to vent lengths up to 7 inches.
http://www.erowid.org/archive/sonora.../balvarius.htm
Given their psychedelic properties do you suppose we were influenced maybe just a little and that is the origin of the disparity in your and our size estimation vs all the "science" sources quoting each other without accreditation on the web?
We too were not druggies. That darned toad seemed way bigger than 7 inches.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
<font color="purple"> And dang it appears that people actually milk the venom and then smoke it to get high. Ain't no way I will ever be a dope head. </font color>
Greetings again....long time no post here, though I lurk regularly.
Jim, We have those Bufo toads in abundance up here, too, during the monsoons.
Funny story, when I took my current job in 1995, (administering computer networks), one of the tasks we supported was a huge database of substance abuse information (for a large govt. clearinghouse contract). As an administrator, I didn't have much use for the information in the DB, but had to learn how to support its functioning. My predecessor and mentor taught me a little trick: make a query of the database, and if the query returns expected results, it is working. For a quick and dirty check, make a query that you know will return a very small number of records. His keywords that he always queried on, because it returned exactly two records, were "toad licking". Sure enough, in the 70's (in California of course), licking the secretions off of the Bufo toads became somewhat of a substance abuse fad, due to their supposed psychedelic properties.
Well I have licked a few erotic things but not toads. And pat I agree those things are bigger than any 7 inches unless they are measuring between the eyes.
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote