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I bought a house in the city of Iquitos in the first days of December 2007. The house is a two-story structure made of brick and situated near the confluence of the Itaya and Amazon Rivers. The house had been vacant for 7 years before I bought it. The house was rough from those years of no one living in it. The fixtures had been taken out of the only bathroom. The kitchen was a bare cement walled room and so was the storage room next to it in the back of the house on the first floor. Those two rooms were full of roosting bats. In the storage room was a dry well of two meters deep. In this dry well I noticed some fair sized toads. I decided not to “forcefully” remove any of these animals. I assumed that they would leave on their own as remodeling commenced. The house also had a lot of geckos, ants, spiders and other insects. It was no surprised to me to have all this bioactivity in the house since it is situated in the most bio-diverse area in the world. I have always enjoyed studying and keeping animals and found all these creatures interesting too.  I let the toads loose in the front rooms of the house hoping they would eat the bugs in the house. There were a lot of boards and other construction materials for them to hide around and under. I would often encounter them as I was going through the materials looking for the right boards. My house is not “toad proof” and these animals could leave by going under the space beneath the front door anytime they pleased. They probably originally entered the house this way. I ended up with two toads that stayed with me. One was larger than the other. They stayed in the house because they wanted to. We developed a mutually beneficial relationship. My house and I offered them a degree of protection and they ate a lot of bugs. The only drawback was that they left droppings and urine puddles on the floor. I needed to clean these up nearly every morning. The droppings are slightly smaller and shaped like those of cats. They are full of insect parts. The first small dropping I noticed had me thinking that a rat had left it, but I soon came to realize it was from the toads. It was obvious from the number and size of the droppings that the toads were eating a lot of insects every night (they are nocturnal). As I finished the remodeling and there were less building materials on the floor and the toads would find other places to pass their days at rest. Sometimes they would be under the kitchen stove, under the edge of the shower curtain in the downstairs bathroom, under the bar and later as I got houseplants they came to sleep in them. They became used to me and saw no threat to themselves from me. They didn’t hop away at my approach. When I walk to the kitchen at night when the house is dark, I shuffle my feet so as not to step on them if they were out hunting. If I am away from the house for a few days or so I always find the toads waiting for me outside of the wooden front door, but still inside the barred security door. They hop inside with me when I open the wooden door. I make a joke of this with my friends and tell them “I have no wife to greet me at the door or even a dog: all I have are my toads”. After seven months of living with these toads I have become attached to them and they also seem to like me. I had made a trip to the United States in May to visit my family. While I was away my neighbor (an ex-pat) picked up three just born snakes from outside of my front door. These snakes were fer de lances or lance heads (Bothrops atrox) and are very venomous pit vipers. They were about ten inches long. It is said that the venom of the newborn snakes is more powerful than the larger snakes. He put them in plastic bottles and was keeping them for no particular reason. He offered them to me when I returned. I had an empty aquarium and accepted them. I put them in the tank with some small gravel and put a tight fitting lid on top. I wanted to feed them and collected about a dozen “perroitos de dios” (little dogs of god) that were swarming around my neighbor’s outside lights. I think these one-inch insects are some sort of mole cricket and are fat and juicy. The snakes would each occupy one corner of the aquarium. I put the crickets in hoping they would eat them. The snakes ignored the crickets. After a few hours I decided to remove some of the crickets because they were crawling all over the snakes and seemed to be bothering them. I really didn’t want to put my hand in the tank and as I was trying to figure out how to remove them one of the toads hopped into sight. It was the smaller of the two toads.  I put the toad in the aquarium and it ate seven or eight of the crickets in less than a minute. The other crickets quieted down and I removed the toad. When the toad was removed the other crickets started moving again and continued to bother the snakes. The big toad had made an appearance and I picked him up and put him in the tank to finish eating the crickets. He went right to work and ate two crickets, but as he was zeroing in on a third the cricket it jumped on a snake and the toad’s tongue pulled both the cricket and the snake’s head into his mouth. I was aghast. I assumed the snake was going to bite and kill the toad. I watched as the toad consumed the snake. I took some photos of this and they show the snake disappearing inch by inch. I took the toad out of the aquarium and put him in a covered bucket for the night. I was thinking he was going to die and I didn’t want to have to find the body by smell later on. The following morning I took the lid off of the bucket expecting the worst, but the toad was fine. I let him out and he had a large bowel movement and headed to the plants to sleep for the day. I am convinced that the toads would have eaten any of the little vipers had they entered my house from under the front door. Maybe they did eat some while I was not here and I was never aware of it. My house is almost free of insects now. I used to see quite a few cockroaches and ants. I used to spray a little, but have not had to use anything for a few months now. It has been beneficial to me to have these toads living in the house with me. The geckos are also a big help keeping the spiders down. The geckos work the walls and the toads work the floors. One night in early July around 3am my parrot woke me up. He was flapping around and squawking in his cage. His cage is in the “solar” and area open to the sky in the middle of the house and situated below my bedroom window. He had never done this before. I got out of bed and with flashlight and pistol in hand I went to investigate. Shining the light down towards his cage showed nothing. I did notice that the medium sized toad was sitting in the bucket of a newly potted plant in the solar and he was okay. The parrot quieted down and I went back to bed and to sleep. In the morning when I woke up around 6:30 and was walking to the kitchen through the solar I encountered the large toad badly injured. When I found him the blood was somewhat dry, so I can surmise that he had suffered his wounds a few hours earlier, about the time the parrot woke me up. His left eyelid was torn and hanging, he had three deep puncture/cuts around his head, one of the large glandular warts near his neck was gone and he had a half inch hole sliced into the right side of his body where his “inflation” lung was pushing itself outside the body cavity through the skin (toads can “inflate” their bodies so they appear bigger to predators. I think this is done with extra bladders attached to the normal lungs). I performed first aide on the toad. I washed him well in cool water to remove the dry blood and so I could see the extent of the injuries. He kept inflating himself as I handled him and this caused the inflator lung to extrude through the cut even more than when he was at rest. I used the handle of a small teaspoon to slip the lung back in his body cavity. I had to hold the skin closed with one hand to keep the lung inside. Since I couldn’t suture with one hand I had to use a stapler to close the hole and hold the skin together. I applied antibiotic ointment to the deep cuts in his head and other wounded tissue. I put him in his favorite plant and hoped for the best. He died about twelve hours later. I buried him on a hill overlooking the river. I suspected a cat or a rat caused the injuries to the toad. The only possible witness was the parrot and unfortunately he isn’t talking (maybe he doesn’t want to become a stool pigeon). All the windows and doors of my house are barred, but not screened. Sometimes I leave a window open on the second story in the front of the house. The solar has iron bars too. Several months ago I had seen a cat in the front room of the second floor of the house and scared it off. I have also seen rats in the street outside of the house at night. From what I have read, most animals avoid the toads because of the toxins and supposed bad taste (see below). The more I read the less likely it seemed that a cat would maul the toad. A few days after the toad died I noticed that a rat had torn open some bags of flour and beans in the lower cabinets in the kitchen. The rat had dragged a very small bag of flour through the inside of the cabinets and down to where the sink drain passes through the bottom shelf. The rat had made quite a mess leaving a trail of flour nearly four meters long going through the silverware tray, over dishtowels and flour was everywhere. There were rat droppings and the smell of its urine in the cabinets too. I was mad and determined eliminate the rat. I removed the items on the lower shelf in the cabinets and pried up the boards that make up the bottom shelf. I saw the rat and it was in no great hurry to escape me. I took a shot at it with my .22 pistol and missed. The rat ran to another part of the cabinets. I then closed all the cabinet doors so it could not escape and went and got a short machete from the shop. I started opening the cabinet doors to find the rat and I saw it just sitting by the first door I had opened. This seemed odd behavior, but it could have been deafened by the gunshot. I gave the rat a quick whack with the machete and broke its back killing it. The rat’s body was about 6.5 inches (16.5cm) and the tail added another 5 inches (12.5cm) for a total length of almost a foot (29cm). It was not very big by rat standards, but a more or less normal sized young animal. Rats have long, sharp chisel like teeth and this rats teeth looked like what had cut up the toad so badly. I can only surmise what had happened the night the toad was wounded. The rat probably entered the house from under the front door. The toad must have been in the solar when the rat was on its way to the kitchen. I don’t believe the rat would have attacked the toad with out reason, especially with all the other food it could have eaten. The toad must have grabbed the rat by the hindquarters to initiate contact. While the toad was holding the rat’s hindquarters the rat must have delivered a series of quick slashing blows to the toad. It would have only taken a few seconds for it to happen. (I have seen cornered rats attempt to defend themselves against my dogs before. The rat will rear up on their haunches and slash with their teeth. The body acts as a lever and the teeth are very sharp). A far as I am concerned, the toad was a hero and laid his life down in defense of the house. The toads seemed to have become territorial and were willing to defend the house against all small intruders. There is also the possibility that he was just hungry, but an animal that defends territory does so to secure a food supply and or mates. Unfortunately the rat was too much for the toad to handle. In the days following the death of the large toad I would encounter the medium sized one wandering around the house during the day and night making a sort of chirping sound. I assume it was calling for its lost friend. I would not have believed that a toad could make a show of loss like this, but there is no other explanation. The medium toad left the house after a few days and I did not see it for about 10 days. The toad returned after I killed the rat and is now living in back of the bar as it did before. I would never have believed that toads were capable of displays of affection, bravery and grief, but I have seen it and I am convinced there is no other explanation for the seemingly noble behavior that I have witnessed. Maybe there is something to the old wives tale about there being a prince inside a toad. About Cane Toads: These toads are known as cane toads, marine toads and giant toads in English and as sapos in Spanish. The Latin name is Bufo marinus. They look very much like our American and Fowler toads in the United States except they get as large as 8 inches (20 cm.) in length. Cane toads have been introduced to the United States, Australia and other places. They have become a problem for other wildlife in Florida as well as Australia. I have handled lots of toads in my life. American toads will urinate on your hands when you pick them up, so I learned to always pick them up by the head end of the body and avoid the wet end. I handled these toads the same way, even though I haven’t had one pee on me yet. Several people had told me that the skin of the cane toad is toxic or poisonous and you should not handle them. I was told this after handling them many times and not necessarily washing my hands immediately afterwards. I have suffered no ill effects. Now I do wash my hands well after handling them. My field guides and nature books say different things about the strength of the toxins. One book says that a cat or dog can die just from having a toad in its mouth and another book says that the toxin is just disagreeable to other animals and they avoid molesting the toad for that reason. Another book says it is “innocuous to humans; however it is best left alone, since secretions from the large ear glands may cause irritations or brief, excruciating pain when coming into contact with the eye or open wounds”. Yet another book says that the toxin is part of the recipe used in Haiti to make people into zombies. A naturalist friend of mine told me that he accidentally got the toxin in his eyes after squeezing the glands to show someone how they secrete the toxin. He was blind for three days afterwards. |