Endangered
Arroyo toad
Anaxyrus californicus
The arroyo toad is a true toads in the family Bufonidae, endemic to California, U.S.
Appearance
It has horizontal pupils, and is greenish, grey or salmon on the dorsum with a light-colored stripe across the head and eyelids. It has light sacral and mid-dorsal patches, large, oval and widely separated parotoid glands, and weak or absent cranial crests. The juvenile of this species are ashy-white, olive or salmon on the dorsal side, with or without black spotting.
The arroyo toad is a stocky, blunt-nosed, warty-skinned species of toad, 5 to 7.5 cm (2.0 to 3.0 in) long.
Range and habitat
The arroyo toad prefers sandy or cobbly washes with swift currents and associated upland and riparian habitats, in Southern California from Santa Barbara County south into northwestern Baja California. Its presence or absence can signal the overall health of its habitat. An arroyo, in the desert called a wash, is a predominantly dry creek or river bed.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Diet and breeding
The arroyo toad is nocturnal, spending most of the day underground with exception to mating season. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on microbes found in the sand by the water where they hatch.
For the most part, young arroyo toads feed on ants and other small insects. When they grow their diet changes to include small beetles. The breeding season of the arroyo toad revolves around the months of late winter and early spring after seasonal rains.
In crisis
It is currently classified as an Endangered species on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species because of habitat destruction. The total estimated breeding population is less than 3,000 individuals. In 1994 when the species was listed, only six of the 22 extant populations south of Ventura were known to contain more than a dozen adults.
The most important threats to the arroyo toad stem from human activities. Other smaller threats are due to introduced non−native predators such as bullfrogs and predatory fish, non−native invasive plants, drought, wildfire and wildfire suppression, unseasonal water releases from dams, and light and noise pollution from adjacent developments.
Chytrid fungus, collection, and wet-forest loss are the usual pressures on frogs with a high threat category.
Arroyo toad is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Arroyo toad, Wikidata item Q28030852. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
