Breeding
Common Frog and Toad males gather at pond edges and call to attract females, jumping on their backs and clasping them tightly with their front legs (in amplexus) to claim their mate. Other males may try to push off the lucky male and balls of struggling frogs and toads are sometimes found with a single female in the centre. Frogs arrive at their breeding ponds over several weeks towards the beginning of spring and then spawn in large numbers, filling the shallow pond edges with clumps of spawn containing perhaps 2-3,000 eggs each. The males’ croaking to attract females can be heard over long distances. Once spawning is over most leave the ponds to hunt insects on land, but some remain around the water’s edge, especially in hot summers.
Toads migrate to their breeding ponds all together on damp spring nights and many thousands may move over just a few days. Special human ‘toad patrols’ are often set up to collect them in buckets where they have to cross busy roads to reach their ponds and road signs are put up to warn drivers at known toad crossings. Toads lay their eggs in double ribbons which are wound around pond plants in deeper water.
Male newts are the first to leave hibernation in early spring, making their way back to their breeding ponds where they will feed and bring themselves into breeding condition. They develop crests, high colouration and sometimes webbing on their feet to advertise themselves as fit mates to the females which arrive later. Once the breeding season arrives, they try to attract females by swimming in front of them, turning broadside on to advertise their breeding colours and spots, and furiously fanning their scent towards the females with their tails.
If a female is interested, she will nudge the male, which then delivers a neat sperm package in front of her. She picks it up in her vent (cloaca) as she passes over it and then may store the sperm for several months inside her body. Several males may compete for the same female and some may pretend to be female themselves to lure away competitors from their target female.
The female lays around 200 individual eggs over the next eight-twelve weeks, each one on a single pond plant leaf, which is then pressed on to the egg’s sticky surface by her hind feet to protect it from predators.