Hi, tweets.

Just a postscript to the recent posts on toads. Or should I call it a
postpost?

Western Toads (Bufo boreas) are still superabundant at some lakes in
the Cascades, even though they have declined greatly in recent years;
declines in the lowlands have been the most severe.

Just two summers ago we were checking some of the lakes at South
Prairie, in Skamania County, and were flabbergasted at the windrows
of toadlets along the lake shores. They were so dense that large
numbers of them on the bottoms of the piles were dead. It's a little
creepy to see this gray, moving mass along the shore of a lake. I've
also seen this in past years, much as Jeff Gibson described. At other
lakes in the last 5 years I've seen the tadpoles (or toadpoles) in
huge, dense masses of thousands of individuals. At times they move
along shorelines in such groups, looking like huge, black snakes.
I've got photos of both tadpoles and toadlets in aggregations, and
I'm still impressed whenever I look at them.

Being in such numbers, of course, are natural for toads, which are
toxic to predators and which apparently aggregate like this when very
small to make it clear what they are. Perhaps because they have few
or no predators, they have no reason to be cryptic or hidden, and
advertising their invulnerability is a better strategy.

One of our students at the University of Puget Sound has been
studying a population in a lake at Northwest Trek, so at least some
persist in the western lowlands.

Finally, I've never seen a toad biking up a steep grade, as Russell
Rogers reported. I think we need a photo of that, Russell!
-----
Dennis Paulson
1724 NE 98 St.
Seattle, WA 98115
206-528-1382
dennispaulson at comcast.net



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