<p><strong>STRANGE AFFECTION: MALE <em>BUFO BUFO</em> (ANURA: BUFONIDAE) PASSIONATELY EMBRACING A BULGE OF MUD</strong></p>

Abstract

The paper reports a case of a male of Bufo bufo (Anura: Bufonidae) passionately embracing a bulge of mud.

Necrophiliac behaviour in the recently described species Scinax tsachila (Anura: Hylidae), with a review of necrophilia in amphibians

“…Males congregate at breeding areas in higher numbers than females and call or actively search for females. Competition among males is so high that in some occasions unusual amplexus occurs with dead conspecifics, such as females (Table 1a), other species (Table 1b), egg clutches [7], or even plants or inanimate objects [2,8,9].…”

“…Interspecific necrophiliac behaviour has been reported in eight species (Table 1b). Necrophilia is primarily due to two causes: (1) Incorrect recognition of living females by males, as seen in the field and experimentally demonstrated in toads [2,9] or (2) death by drowning during amplexus [12]. For instance, given that multiple amplexus increases the risk of drowning, females of Rana temporaria Linnaeus, 1758 feign death to avoid amplexus as males may reject these females.…”

The Cases of Abnormal Amplexus in Anura on the Territory of the Chernivtsi Region, Ukraine

“…Moreover, in most cases registered in B. variegata and R. temporaria (3 and 6 accordingly), it was a combination of multiple amplexus and incorrect embrace (a part of males grasped female from the abdominal side). Th e cases of multiple amplexus for this species were known from a number of publications (Shcherbak and Shcherban, 1980;Hartel et al, 2007;Gherghel et al, 2008 b;Mollov et al, 2010;Kuzmin, 2012;Đorđević and Simović, 2014;Pysanets, 2014;Pupins et al, 2022). Th e disparity in the ratio of sex during reproduction may be a possible explanation of this phenomenon.…”

“…Interacting of males of this species with inanimate objects are also known. For example, some investigators described amplexus of B. bufo with a piece of wood (Shcherbak and Shcherban, 1980), a lump of silt (Đorđević and Simović, 2014) and, even, plastic cup (Mollov et al, 2010) and plastic bottle (Pupins et al, 2022). Seemingly, that is the result of a lack of females in breeding sites.…”