Get Rid of Insects in the Garden With Toads

By Mary B. Bowling
Published on July 1, 1983
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PHOTO: FOTOLIA/USBFCO
Toads are natural insecticides and easy to attract to your home garden.

The dog may be “man’s best friend” . . .but if that person is a gardener, his or her most treasured ally is likely to be the humble toad! Warty-skinned, dumpy, and lethargic, the jewel-eyed toad is a prodigious consumer of just about anything that moves and will fit in its mouth. Although most of its prey falls into the category we label “pests” (toads love cutworms!), some of the toad’s diet does consist of such beneficial creatures as bees, ladybugs, and lacewings. This is unfortunate, but it’s surely forgivable for a little animal that can snap up nearly 100 insects every single night . . . a total of nearly 10,000 bugs over a three month growing season! Beetles of every description, caterpillars, flies, larvae, moths, and wireworms are all fair game for this insectivore. (It likes slugs and snails, too.) The amount that an individual toad may consume in a single feeding is astonishing. One toad was observed to eat 86 houseflies . . . another ate 65 gypsy moth larvae . . . while still another swallowed 37 adult tent caterpillars!

It’s pretty obvious, then, that a biological bug control of such talent and efficiency should not be ignored. Indeed, the savvy modern gardener would do well to cultivate this little amphibian’s acquaintance.

Use Toads to Get Rid of Insects in the Garden — No Matter Where you Live

Eighteen species of true toads live in this country, with at least a few kinds to be found in every state in the union (yes, even in Alaska!). They’re particularly abundant in the eastern and Gulf states and the Mississippi Valley region . . . but in truth, they fill many different environmental niches and can be found in every sort of habitat from high mountains to rain forests to coastal plains to deserts.

Although similar, toads and frogs are easily distinguished. Mature toads are dry, bumpy skinned, brownish, plump, deliberate in their movements, and look rather pompous. They hop — slowly — and may puff themselves up to discourage unwelcome attention. Frogs, on the other hand, are moist and smooth-skinned, greenish, slender, a bit dandified in appearance, and alert. They leap –often with a total disregard for the consequences — and usually try to escape rather than bluff would-be captors.

How to Catch a Toad

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