What Do Toads Eat? Insects, Slugs and Earthworms in the Wild

What toads eat in the wild

Adult toads are generalist predators of small animals that live on or near the ground. Stomach studies of the American toad and the European common toad show a broadly similar menu:

Beetles and ants often top the list by number, while slugs and earthworms make up a large share by weight, especially in wet weather. What a toad eats on a given night depends on what is moving around it: in a dry wood it may be mostly ants and beetles, in a damp garden mostly slugs and worms.

Toads are not fussy, but they are limited by mouth size. Small toads take small prey, and large females can manage big earthworms, large beetles and caterpillars.

How do toads catch their food?

Toads are mostly sit-and-wait or slow-stalking hunters. A hungry toad sits still or creeps forward until prey is within reach, then strikes in a fraction of a second. The tongue is attached at the front of the mouth, so it flips forward and out, and its soft, sticky surface grips the prey and pulls it back in.

Movement is the key trigger. Toads respond strongly to small objects moving across their field of view and largely ignore prey that stays still. Classic laboratory experiments showed that toads strike at a long, thin shape moving lengthwise, like a worm, but not at the same shape moving sideways, which shows how finely their vision is tuned to prey.

Large or wriggling food, such as an earthworm, is pushed into the mouth with the front feet. Toads have no teeth and swallow prey whole. Like frogs, they often blink as they swallow, and the eyes sink down into the head, which helps push food toward the throat.

When do toads feed?

Most adult toads feed from dusk into the night, especially on warm, humid or rainy evenings when slugs, worms and many insects are active. By day they rest in burrows or under cover, as explained in Where do toads go during the day?

Toads often position themselves where prey gathers. They sit along paths, at the edge of lawns, near compost heaps or under outdoor lights that attract moths and beetles. How much a toad eats varies a lot: it may take many small prey on a good night and then nothing for several days when the weather is cold or dry. In cold climates toads eat nothing at all during winter hibernation, living on fat stored in late summer and fall.

What do tadpoles and toadlets eat?

Toad tadpoles live on a completely different diet. They have small, horny beaks and rows of tiny tooth-like ridges that scrape algae and soft plant material from stones and leaves, and they also eat organic debris on the bottom. Groups of tadpoles may feed on dead animals in the water too.

At metamorphosis, the gut and mouth change and the young toad becomes a predator. Newly transformed toadlets, often only about 1 cm (0.4 in) long, feed on springtails, mites, aphids, tiny flies and the smallest spiders, then take larger prey as they grow. How tadpoles change into adults is described in How do tadpoles turn into frogs?

Do all toads eat the same things?

The basic diet of live invertebrates is shared by nearly all toads, but size makes a difference. Small species and toadlets stick to tiny insects and mites. The American toad and common toad take a wide range of ground invertebrates. Very large species, such as the cane toad of the Americas, which can exceed 20 cm (8 in), will also swallow small vertebrates such as frogs, lizards, small snakes and mice now and then, and they eat almost anything they can fit into their mouths.

Toads also differ in where they hunt. Some forest toads search the leaf litter, while toads of open country and suburbs are more likely to wait on bare ground and paths where moving prey is easy to see.

Why toads are good for gardens

Because they eat slugs, snails, beetle larvae, caterpillars and other invertebrates that feed on plants, toads are welcome visitors in gardens. They do not single out pests, but over a season a toad eats a great many small animals, and gardeners often notice that a resident toad returns to the same spot every evening.

Toads are most likely to stay where they find shelter by day and safe water for breeding nearby. Logs, stones, leaf litter, dense planting and a shallow, unstocked pond all help, while heavy use of garden chemicals reduces the invertebrates toads depend on and can harm amphibians directly.