Hobbies And Interests
Amphiuma and Andrias
The congo eel, or amphiuma, can grow to three feet long and has four tiny and useless feet. It has lungs but neither tongue nor gills. It's found in ditches, burrows or rice paddies or under debris. It lays its eggs under mud or rotted leaves and may stay to guard them. It eats worms, insects, mollusks, crustaceans, small fishes and snakes, frogs and younger congo eels. It can be kept in an aquarium. In captivity the congo eel can live 25 years and should be handled with care, as it has a strong bite.
Members of the Andrias genus are the largest salamanders in the world. They're found in China and Japan and can be over five feet long. Their metamorphosis from the larval stage is partial, as they never develop eyelids and their tails remain finlike. They're almost entirely aquatic, and the female lays long strings of eggs which are fertilized, and then guarded, by the male.
Pipidae
The Surinam toad -- which is a frog because it lives mostly in water while toads live mostly on land -- is a native of South America and is almost completely aquatic. It's extremely flat and the color of a brown leaf. They are about four to five inches long. Like the congo eel, the Surinam toad lacks a tongue. The female carries her eggs embedded in the skin of her back. In some species the eggs hatch out into tadpoles, and in others the tadpoles remain in the mother's back until they emerge as tiny frogs.
The Cane Toad
The cane toad is a large amphibian, which grows about 4 to 6 inches in length. It's native from the Rio Grande south to the central Amazon. It's been introduced into the West Indies, Hawaii and Australia and now is one of the most invasive species on earth, according to the Invasive Species Specialist Group. It's a gray, olive or brown animal with horizontal pupils that can be as large as nine inches long and live up to 10 years. When threatened it exudes bufotoxin, which, if ingested, can be fatal. It eats insects, crustaceans and snails.
Paracyclotosaurus
Paracyclotosaurus was a huge amphibian that lived during Triassic times and is now extinct. Large reptiles had proved to be better suited to terrestrial living than the amphibians, which always needed to stay close to the water. Some Paracyclotosaurus specimens were more than 13 or 14 feet long; they had two-foot-long flat heads and looked like crocodiles.