Miscellaneous - Sounds Wild
Toadlets

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Toadlets

Walking through the grass near a pond on Douglas Island near Juneau on a cool, overcast afternoon in mid-July, we are startled to see a swarm of tiny toads scattering in front of us. They’re western toads, the only toad species in Alaska, and these Alaskan western toads are sometimes referred to as a subspecies – called the boreal toad. These toadlets look like adults, but all are less than an inch long. A closer look reveals that some even have small tails – they’ve just morphed from the aquatic tadpole stage to this tiny adult terrestrial form. We look around, and there are toads everywhere, thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of toadlets.

I was here in one night in mid-April when the adult toads were courting. All the western toads in an area mate in just a couple days and nights – something known as explosive breeding. A female can lay 16 or 17,000 eggs in a clutch. The incubation, tadpole stage and metamorphosis to the terrestrial form takes about three months, depending on spring temperatures, and this was a warm spring in Southeast Alaska, so these toadlets are right on schedule.

A few days later I return to find only dozens of toadlets in the grass – they are dispersing, moving away from the pond and into the surrounding forests and meadows.