Practical Care of the Oriental Firebelly Toad, Bombina orientalis
By Alex B
Introduction:
The firebelly toad, Bombina orientalis, is a small (2-3 inch) toad native to eastern Asia, found from southern China up to Korea and possibly Russia. Their natural habitat is woodland areas surrounding permanent bodies of water. These toads are a very primitive species of amphibian, perhaps the most primitive in culture, and are a very popular and easy pet. These toads are very forgiving and can tolerate a wide range of care conditions and have relatively basic needs. These toads get their name for the red color of their underside, which indicates poison. These toads are mildly toxic, but it does not harm humans unless the toad is ingested. It should be known however, that some people are allergic to these toads, and the toxins will make open cuts sting very badly, and if hands are not washed after handling, don’t be surprised at a sour taste after touching or your lips (I know this because I handled a few, then, without washing my hands, stuck a finger in a jar of frosting and when I put it in my mouth I could taste the liquidly toxins). I would not be overly concerned about the toxins though, unless you are allergic or eat a large quantity, they are not dangerous. It should be noted that pets such as cats or dogs and small children should not have access to these toads because they do not recognize the fact that these toads are poisonous to eat. In the wild, these toads, if on land, will flip and reveal their red undersides if threatened to scare off potential predators. This is known as the unken reflex, unken being German for toad. Captive individuals lose this instinct and eventually become tame around humans, particularly if they associate the presence of a human with food. With proper care these toads have been known to live up to 20 years, but a more average lifespan is 5-10 years, and keep in mind a good percentage of these toads in pet stores are wild caught, and they may already be 2-6 years old or even older in some cases. These toads make wonderful pets and are an enjoyment for anyone.
Obtaining a Toad:
These toads are very common in pet stores and anyone can go to a local store and pick one up. However, randomly going to a store and picking up just any toad is careless. You want to look for a healthy specimen that will give you years of enjoyment. Avoid unreasonable prices for these toads, since they are incredibly common and low maintenance, avoid paying more than $15 for one, and a reasonable price range is between 4 and 10 dollars. If you choose to obtain some through an online site be sure they have a good reputation for selling healthy animals, since you cannot examine a specimen bought through the internet. This does not necessarily mean a pet store is any better. I’ve seen very unhealthy toads at pet stores before. Just because these toads don’t require a whole lot of care doesn’t mean they will do well with long term neglect (they will do fine for about 1 week at less than ideal conditions, and are very resilient). A healthy toad should have vivid colors, clear and wide open eyes, a dark, heart shaped pupil, moist, unbroken skin, is plump, alert, and active. I would avoid any stores who have skinny, discolored (a chocolate brown is not bad, but merely a variation) or blotchy looking toads. If there are dead animals in the cage (particularly if they are dead in the water area of the holding cage), you should avoid buying from the supplier. Avoid anyone who doesn’t guarantee the animals (I buy from petsmart usually, and they guarantee the animals for 2 full weeks). Also, no bones or bumps should be visible underneath the skin. The toad also should be able to coordinate its movements properly and balance itself properly in water (if it tilts to one side or has problems swimming it could be malnutrition or a spinal injury sustained by another animal. Also, when picked up or held the toad should vigorously try to get free (a good test would be to form a cup with your hands and lightly hold it and see if it tries to free itself from your grasp, but be gentle so it doesn’t harm itself). Lastly, the toad should not have any discharge coming from any areas of its body unless it’s defecating. The feces should be dark, round, firm, and consistent. Any misshape, red or discoloration, or runniness can be a cause for alarm. To see the stool, put it in a small cage with moist paper towels on the bottom, and within about a day it should defecate.
Housing:
After purchasing one or more healthy individuals, you need to set up a cage for the toads. They can survive several days in a small, ventilated cage with moist paper towels on the floor while you set up a permanent cage for the toad. A single toad can do fine in a cage with an 8” by 8” floor, and a 10 gallon fish tank can house up to 6 fully grown toads. These toads are very hardy and can tolerate a wide range of setups. A cage with 3 inches of moist peat moss, a small water bowl, and fake plants or vines is a good, simple setup for them. You can even add live plants that have minimal light requirements and that are free of any fertilizers and pesticides. Sphagnum moss also works well, and both mosses are readily available as bricks at pet stores, and adding a gallon of water expands them. Another option is the half land, half water cage. This is accomplished with rinsed aquarium gravel, and the land area has a taller pile of gravel so when you add about 2-4 inches of water to the tank, about half of the tank worth of gravel juts out of the water. Be sure to cover the land gravel with moss so the toads don’t accidentally ingest it, which can kill them. A third option is the mainly aquatic option, with a thin layer of gravel on the bottom of the tank, 3-6 inches of water, fake or live plants, and a fake rock, Lilly pad, or other object sticking out of the water to serve as land. Anything in between any of the 3 setups also works. It mainly depends on your taste and budget, but the most important points are no chemicals, a moist environment with at least a small swimming area, shelter, and temperatures between 68 and 74 degrees, which can be accomplished with a small light (do not place directly on plastic lids and be sure the toads can’t directly touch the bulb) over the cage. Also, the water should be rain water or spring water (at a grocery store, a gallon jug of spring water can cost less than a dollar), as tap water has too many minerals and chlorine and distilled water is too pure and can cause problems with the toads’ fluid intake and possibly blood pressure (remember the concept of diffusion). Any visible waste (shed skin, dead insects, feces) should be removed when it is seen and every 6 months everything should be taken out, rinsed, moss replaced, and cleaned well (use hot water only, no soap or chemicals). Once a year replace gravel. I typically use the mostly aquatic setup and once a month I stir up the gravel to loosen up the waste, then I use a fine beta net and a pipette to remove the now floating waste and every 4-6 months I rinse everything and clean it well. If the toads are actively spawning (will get to this later) it’s a good idea to wait until all eggs hatch before doing too much cleaning to avoid harming them. It is not a good idea to house other species with these toads, mainly because of the toad’s toxins. If you do house something with the toads, be sure both animals are similar sizes so they don’t try and eat each other. I have housed treefrogs with these toads without a problem since the toads can handle a mossy cage and the treefrogs stay off the ground unless feeding and they don’t have too much contact with each other so they don’t absorb each other’s secretions. Just be sure to meet both species’ needs and that they both eat enough.
Feeding:
Firebelly toads are eager eaters and will go after any invertebrate they can swallow (they will sometimes bite each other’s feet, but it is not something to worry about unless one toad is significantly larger than the other. Fully grown toads need only to be fed 2-3 times a week and can go up to 3 weeks without food in summer. Crickets are a fairly good staple diet, they are easy to care for and gut load. Crickets do have a few disadvantages, such as their noises, odor, death rate, expensiveness, and their potential to bite your toad. Crickets are good if you have only a few toads, as you can easily buy about 100 crickets, which will last you about 5 weeks, though if you have a large number or are looking for a better feeder option, roaches are great. Crickets and roaches can be kept in similar ways. For crickets, I take a small 3 gallon tank. I put a thin layer of plain, organic oatmeal on the floor of the cage, and I place 2 small bowls on the floor of the tank. In one bowl I place water gels; in the other I place fruits and vegetables. On the oatmeal I place fish flakes, which the crickets will greedily eat up. I place cardboard egg crate for climbing surfaces, add 100 or so crickets, cover the container and store it in a cool, shady location in the house. If you feed the toads every 3 days, 100 crickets, assuming you have 2 toads, and every cricket survives to be food, you should be set for about 5½ weeks. Keep in mind cricket prices are rising from the virus that is killing them off, and they add up after so many months. If you choose to hibernate the toads, then that’s 3 months you don’t need crickets for, but this will stimulate spawning (will get to this later). Roaches are my preferred feeder insect. Not only are they inexpensive and disease free, they can be bred for a continuous supply of food. I use a 4 gallon, flat Rubbermaid container with a ventilated lid. Lobster roaches, Nauphoeta cinerea, are an excellent feeder roach. I set up the bin with a butter container lid for dry food (crushed dog food and fish flakes) and a slightly deeper plastic lid for fruits and vegetables. Then I add a few layers of egg crate and I buy 100 mixed roaches. As a bonus, since the adult roaches are too big for the toads to eat, you can leave all adults in the colony to reproduce and feed off smaller babies. Also, they are tropical insects from the Caribbean that need warm temperatures to survive and if a few get loose they will not be a problem, crickets are more problematic if they get loose than tropical roach species (I only use tropical roaches that are no problem if they escape, and rarely have escapees since they hang out with the other roaches due to the smell of their roach relatives-humans typically cannot smell roaches). These roaches climb plastic so be sure to have a tight lid on the cage. I keep these under an infrared lamp which keeps them at about 80 degrees and they grow and breed quickly. I would avoid excessive feeding of a starting roach colony (let at least half the nymphs reach adulthood and breed for about 2 months), though usually plenty of extra roaches are shipped and you can afford to feed off about 20 or so. With both feeder insects be sure to keep the cages clean and food constant and fresh. In order to maintain their red bellies, these toads need carotene in the food they eat. This can usually be achieved by gut loading feeder insects with things such as carrots, peppers, mango, oranges, sweet potato, and other fruits and vegetables full of beta carotene and other carotenoids, but many tropical fish flakes with color enhancers also help. Things such as bloodworms and brine shrimp also help maintain the red color and buying frozen ones that you then thaw and wave in front of the toad with long feeding tongs is worthwhile. Not only does this help simulate the diet they would have in the wild but will help improve your relationship with your fairly smart, long lived, amphibious friend. Not every feeding they get needs to contain carotenes when adults, as treats, waxworms, maggots, silkworms, small earthworms, and hornworms are nice feeder insects. Be sure to feed the toad things not much larger than the head size, as they swallow prey whole. Adult firebellies need food every 3-4 days, though in some cases should receive more. Also, younger ones need food every other day (most people say every day but I find really young toadlets don’t have that kind of appetite, they do build an appetite as they develop); otherwise they will not be properly nourished and will be undersized adults.
Breeding:
If you have been keeping these toads for a few years and decide you really like them and wish to breed them, you will find it relatively easy to do so. However, do not just breed any animal for the sake of breeding them. Keep in mind firebelly toads produce hundreds of young and you may be responsible for all of those. If you are only looking for a few more, it is a better idea to just buy a couple more at the pet store. If you really do want to study their life cycle and grow your own, just keep in mind it is a lot of work and can be difficult. You won’t make much money if you sell them, and unless you live in their native region, they cannot be released into the wild. You are ethically obligated to care for the young that you decided to bring into the world, so keep these things in mind before and while you put forth a breeding plan. Another aspect of responsible breeding is the fact that only healthy, fully mature individuals should be put through such a demanding process and inbreeding should be avoided at all costs. Breeding these toads can prove difficult in the sense of obtaining males and females. Since about 90% of this species’ population is male, it can prove difficult to find one or two females that you can use. Compared to females, males are slightly smaller and often have bumpier backs. They also have thicker forearms and nuptial pads, but these differences are hardly distinctive and they are difficult to differentiate. Just picking a huge, fat toad out of a pet store does not guarantee it to be female. Males behave differently than females. They make more noise (though an unreceptive female will make a frantic vibrating chirping sound when grabbed; males accidentally grabbed will make the same sound), which is anything from a soft tink to an almost ape like holler. Also, when in a cage with a few inches of water, males will grab and attempt to mate with passing toads quite often, and sooner than later you will notice this, and since only males do this, if you have a toad that never grabs another toad and you’ve had it for a good 2 months, it’s a safe bet its female. My female often times is always round even when the males are skinny and they haven’t eaten in weeks (such as after hibernating) and she hogs the food sometimes. The more toads you have, the better, though I had success with a group of 3 males and 1 female, it is ideal to have twice that number. The more crowded the better in the breeding season. The only caution I have is not to have a huge over accumulation of males and only 1 female, anything more than 3 males to 1 female is a safety danger, as many males attempting to mate with a single female can severely injure her, I had this happen to a small female and she sustained a spinal injury she never recovered from. Another option is to buy some from an online site that will sex adults for you, they are more experienced and are usually accurate, the only disadvantage is shipping is stressful, expensive, and you cannot examine the specimen you receive before purchasing. After you have 1 or 2 females and 3-6 males to go with them, you must begin to condition them to breed. First, make a peak daylight of 16 hours, which should be done in early July (if it gets cold in the winter in your area this helps). A timer used for lamps and other electrical devices works well for this, just attach it to the lamp over the cage. Every 2 weeks decrease the daylight by half an hour and feed the toads very well. Start letting the water level drop, and when the toads have about 12½ hours of daylight, they will lose interest in food and act more sluggish. This is a good sign. Make sure they were loaded up with food and are nice and plump, feeding them waxworms helps them bulk up. If you had peak daylight the first week of July, it should be late October/early November now. Take the toads and place them in a small tank with 5 inches of moist sphagnum moss and place it in a cool area that doesn’t get warmer than 60 degrees but no cooler than about 55, though they can tolerate temps as low as 48 for SHORT periods of time (I know this on account of a winter storm/power outage that drastically cooled down my house and they were fine). I use the closet in my room, since it juts out of the house and is a bit cooler than my room in winter (see why it is a good idea to hibernate them in sync with your region’s winter?) but any other closet in my upstairs works and one leads up to an unheated attic so it gets nice and cool, but be careful so it doesn’t get too cold. Unheated sheds work as long as they are insulated a bit and garages can also be used but exhaust from a car may harm them. If your fridge is set between 55 and 60 degrees (mini fridges may work if you don’t want to do this to a whole big fridge), you can put them in that but be sure they don’t dry up. They don’t need much daylight (I usually remove them from the hibernation location for a few minutes once a week, and every month for an hour so I can add a few insects), and barely lighting them at all really helps convince them it’s winter. They may burrow, they may not, but they don’t move too much, which is nothing to be concerned about. Every month it’s not a bad idea to throw in a few crickets or something (1 insect per toad is plenty, they may not even eat), but nothing major. After about 12 weeks, it is a good idea to set up the big tank again so they can awaken. Get gravel (white gravel makes it easy to see eggs) and make a deep end and a shallow end in the tank. The deep end should be 2 inches deeper than the shallow end and cover about ¾ of the tank. In the deep end I put plenty of plants (both real ones with minimal light needs and fake ones that like neglect) and fill the tank with 1½ inches of water and add the toads. I cover the exposed gravel with paper toweling so it does not get ingested. The shallow end has a large fake rock/cave ornament, which seems useless now but in a few weeks will be useful. I give them 13 hours of daylight the day they come out of hibernation, increasing by 30 minutes every other week. The first two weeks they are out of hibernation I feed them heavily daily and give them plenty of dusting supplements. As the weeks progress I add more water and floating aquatic plants. When the water levels are up to about 6 inches at the deepest end (see the use of the rock now?) and daylight hours are at 14½ to 15 (about 6 weeks after finishing hibernating), the toads should spawn. The males will grasp toads any time they are in water, but unless he grabs a receptive female, nothing will occur. Once he finds a receptive female the pair engages in amplexus. The female will not reject the male and during the night she will deposit eggs singly on plant matter. The eggs will be small half black half white balls about the size of the loop of a safety pin and will be encased in a double jelly membrane. They will eventually absorb the white portion and become tadpole shaped, and hatch in 4-8 days depending on temperature. Then 4 days later the tadpoles begin eating. Start them off with food low in protein, it’s healthier for them and helps them bulk up. I always remove tadpoles from the adult cage after they hatch and put them in a separate, 5 gallon tank full of water. If you don’t then the adults may eat the tadpoles. The adults will more than likely spawn again, but don’t put the eggs in the tank full of tadpoles, as they may become quick snacks for the developed tadpoles. I keep the tadpoles at room temperature and put the tank next to the adults so the light reaches them. This means the eggs will grow faster when kept in the adult cage, and when they hatch I transfer them to the tadpole tank with a turkey baster. I start them out on algae as well as blanched lettuce, which I lightly boil for 8 minutes and chop up. I store it in the freezer for safe keeping and when I need some I defrost it in the microwave and take what I need, the rest goes back into the freezer. They eat ravenously and grow rapidly. After about 5 weeks I start feeding them fish flakes, brine shrimp, and bloodworms. They will become toads in 9-11 weeks depending on the temperature. When they start developing front legs they need land areas to climb up on. When they are all toadlets I’d remove all the water and just keep moist paper towels in the cage. The toadlets will be tiny and need to eat fruitflies for the first few months. Fruitflies are easy to culture, you can obtain Drosophila hydei cultures very easily online and when the culture is about 3 weeks old you can take a medium apple, cut it up, blend it in a blender with vinegar, mix ¼ cup orange juice with ¼ cup organic plain oatmeal and stir the apple/vinegar and juice/oatmeal mixes together and place in the bottom of a 32oz deli cup. Add raffia straw and cover with a ventilated lid. In 4-5 days you can add 30 or so adult flies and in about 2 weeks the new culture will keep producing for you. The young toadlets will need to be fed food supplemented with carotenes so they develop red color, though it is difficult when using fruitflies. Dusting tiny feeder insects with a carotene dust helps, gut loading pinhead crickets and tiny baby roaches with carotene filled food is also a good idea, but newly metamorphosized toadlets are too tiny for this. With the small toadlets I often will take a small cup and put some carotene dust in it, pour fruitflies into it, then swirl it. The flies are then coated with the dust and I put the whole cup in the cage. When the flies crawl out of the cup they are eaten before the dust falls off. Be careful though as young toadlets are excellent climbers and if one climbs up the cup and falls into the dust, the dust will dehydrate the toadlet and kill it. I notice young toadlets often have issues catching prey and the sticky tongues are not developed so it is important to have small prey always available. At first, mortality will be high, between 12 and 30%, and if you start out with 100 eggs, only about 10 may grow to full size, most deaths occur between metamorphosis and sexual maturity, very few tadpoles die, but after about 3 months they seem to be more stable. At 4 months old they can be fed thawed bloodworms off a toothpick and this helps them gain nutrients and pigments. The toadlets become mature between 8 and 14 months old and are more robust and tame than their parents, who were likely wild caught.
In Conclusion:
The firebelly toad is an exciting and forgiving pet that is well worth keeping. They are easy and hardy and it is very rewarding to own one and watch it eat and move and become accustomed to you. They are long lived and their ease of care allows anyone to become closer to amphibians. Breeding them gives an encouraging challenge to any hobbyist and these toads are a perfect addition to any household and forever will be.
