Couch's spadefoot

This toad eats bugs, like termites and beetles.

After a rain, it eats a lot!

Couch's spadefoots eat many kinds of small animals without backbones. Many of them are winged termites and termite young, which also come out of the ground when it rains. They also eat beetles, ants, grasshoppers, spiders and crickets.

A spadefoot can eat up to 55 percent of its own body weight, more than half, which can be enough food to last it a whole year underground.

CaliforniaHerps: eats a variety of invertebrates, many of them winged and larval termites that also emerge during rains, plus beetles, ants, grasshoppers, spiders and crickets; can consume up to 55 percent of its body weight, which can be enough food to last a full year. ADW: survives about ten months of dormancy, without feeding, on lipid stores held mainly in fat bodies in the body cavity.

This toad sleeps underground for many months.

The sound of rain wakes it up!

Couch's spadefoots spend about 8 to 10 months of each year buried in the ground, and they can stay underground through as many as two summers with no rain. The low sounds and shaking caused by rain and thunder seem to tell them it is time to come out.

Then the males float on the new pools and call loudly. Animal Diversity Web describes the call as a harsh bleat, like a lamb or a goat.

CaliforniaHerps: underground about 8 to 10 months a year, emerging briefly during spring and summer rains; low-frequency sound and vibration from rain and thunder apparently trigger emergence, rather than soil wetting; can remain underground for as many as two rainless summers, described there as more adapted to extremely dry conditions than any other North American amphibian; males call while floating on the water. ADW: nocturnal and active in rainy conditions; a harsh, noisy, lamb- or goat-like bleat lasting half a second to a second.

There are still many of these toads.

They can even use puddles made by people.

Couch's spadefoot is listed as Least Concern: it lives over a wide area and its numbers are thought to be stable. It has disappeared from some places where towns were built or farmland was watered by irrigation.

But it can also use pools that people make, such as cattle watering tanks and puddles beside roads, which has let it move into places that had few natural pools. In California and Colorado it is listed as a species of special concern.

Least Concern (IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group; Global; assessed 25 August 2020, published 2022; trend stable): hundreds of occurrences in the USA, large subpopulations in northern and central Mexico; locally extirpated in the past by urban development and irrigated agriculture; able to breed in stock tanks and roadside pools, which has let it colonise areas with few natural pools; several protected areas in both countries; Species of Special Concern in California and Colorado (Green et al. 2014, via IUCN). In California, off-highway vehicle use has degraded habitat in the Algodones Dunes (Thomson et al. 2016, via CaliforniaHerps).