Suriname Toad - Pipa pipa

Dante Fenolio

Notes from the Amazon No68: The Suriname Toad (Pipa pipa) is one of several pipid frogs that inhabit the aquatic ecosystems of South America. These bizarre amphibians have a number of aspects to their biology that set them apart from most other amphibians. For example, when it comes time to reproduce, the males and females engage in a sort of aquatic ballet. They exhibit amplexus (a prereproductive synchronization embrace) but they do this as they swim in consecutive somersaults. This mating behavior is followed by egg deposition. This is where it gets really strange – before mating, the female develops a special thick and spongy tissue on her back. The eggs are pushed into the tissue by the breeding pair and they begin to settle into this tissue and the tissue continues to grow around them. After a short time, the eggs are out of sight and buried in this tissue, where each egg will continue to develop in its own little chamber. This is a form of parental care because by keeping the eggs with her, the female provides her offspring a greater probability of survival. Once the eggs hatch, the young remain in these private quarters and finish development into miniatures of the adults. Once they are ready, they burst out from their private rooms in her back and swim away – to live the rest of their lives on their own. All frogs of this genus pass through a similar (although not always exactly the same) process. Another strange feature to these frogs are the tips of the fingers on their hands. They have star shaped organs at the tip of each finger that they can probe into the leaf litter and surroundings to help them find food. Once they find food, they rapidly open their large mouths to suck in things like small invertebrates and fish. We encounter these frogs in slow moving forest streams and pools with lots of thick leaf litter on the bottom of the pool. Many features of these frogs help to blend them in with the leaf litter they live in such as their general flattened shape, their colors, small and irregular tubercles on their sides, and even fleshy appendages that form at the corners of their mouths – which help disrupt any remaining predictable shape of a frog that might allow a predator from above pick them out from the leaf litter. All of these specimens were photographed in Amazonian Peru.