The Underground Hermit

This week, we move from the Middle East to Central America and from birds to amphibians. To find this species, we need to go underground. It likes to burrow.

This kind only has one living species, though several more are known from fossils. It prefers tropical rain forests and scrub as its home but stays burrowed for much of the year.1 Its preferred meals are ants and termites, which it hunts largely below the surface.2 It only emerges from its burrows to breed. The body has loose skin that can be inflated to repel predators.

Breeding in this kind occurs during the rainy season, and males and females are of roughly the same size.3 When tadpoles hatch, they form aggregates of similarly sized individuals that appear to influence both adult size and social behavior.4 Larger tadpoles will sometimes eat their smaller relatives, but in pools containing sometimes hundreds of thousands of tadpoles, these events are unlikely to significantly impact the population.5

Has anyone figured it out yet? Don’t feel bad if you didn’t, there is not a lot of work out there on this kind because it spends so much time underground. This week’s kind is the Rhinophrynidae—the Mexican burrowing toad kind. Stay tuned for next week when we head to a pond to look for yet another monotypic kind.

Burrowing Toad
Greg Schechter from San Francisco, USA, via Wikimedia Commons

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Clue

Your clue for the week is:

This species of bird is found only in Australia and builds large nests in the crowns of trees.

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