Save the Texas "Horny Toad"

Published in the Sun June 15, 2013

Original art by David Stump

When threatened by a predator, the Texas Horned Lizard, widely known as the “Horny Toad,” holds perfectly still in the mistaken belief that its camouflage will protect it.  That strategy might hide it from a hawk, but to a human child a motionless horny toad is all too visible and easy prey.

 

Most Texas baby boomers, and many generations before us, have fond memories of catching and playing with horny toads.  Deprived of video games, our mothers would send us out into the yard, where we were forced to seek entertainment from the landscape.  Both in town and in the country, horny toads were everywhere, providing hours of diversion.  Genie Vogler remembers tying a string around the little horns on their heads and leading them around on a leash.  Dean Hamilton made his captives pull tiny wagons made out of matchboxes.  Another friend, who wishes to remain anonymous because he is otherwise a kindly soul who deeply regrets his misspent youth, used to blow them up with firecrackers.

 

I lived on a busy street in Austin, but there were plenty of horny toads around our house, and I frequently kept one in a shoebox.  I probably tried to feed it Velveeta cheese (a personal favorite snack) and of course it wouldn’t eat, so after a few days I would let it go.  I didn’t know that the horny toads in my yard were feasting on the red harvester ants that had a permanent bed on the far side of the driveway.  We never tried to get rid of the ants; they were just part of the territory.  In fact my sisters and I would take bits of food out to the ant bed and watch the ants pick up the crumbs and carry them around.  (It was so much easier to entertain children in those days.)  They were a pacifist group of ants and never tried to bite us, unlike fire ants which are no fun to play with at all.

 

The harvester ant bed was a flat sandy circle about four feet across with a tunnel in the center.  The ants would go out in search of seeds along trails leading from the bed.  Horny toads would stake out along the trails and eat the ants as they marched by, each horny toad eating 70 to 100 ants a day.  A horny toad has to rotate between several ant beds because the ants wise up and change their trails.

 

So what happened to all the horny toads?  When I mentioned them to my grown children they looked at me as if I had been riding dinosaurs.  The horned lizard does look prehistoric, but they are not extinct.  They still exist, just not so much in Central Texas.  I contacted Lee Ann Linam, a representative of the Horned Lizard Conservation Society and a wildlife biologist with Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD), who has been studying horny toads for decades.  She told me that in the last 15 years, she has received only five unconfirmed reports of horny toad sightings in Williamson County, and those might have been Texas spiny lizards instead, which are quite common.  Texas horned lizards have been listed as threatened by the TPWD since 1977.

 

Habitat loss is a big factor in the decline of horny toads, which prefer native grasslands with bare rocky spots for sunning.  They are not much into shopping malls and suburban developments with St. Augustine lawns.  And as fire ants invaded the area, people became much more hostile to ants in general.  Ant poisons and other insecticides destroyed the harvester ants which are the food supply for the horny toads.  Scientists have tried to teach them to eat fire ants, but they just won’t do it, and who can blame them.

 

Here’s the action plan for horny toad fans.  If you have a red harvester ant bed on your property, do not destroy it.  Harvester ants are the good guys and compete with fire ants.  Check out the trails around the ant bed in mid morning before it gets too hot.  If you see a horny toad, take a picture and send it to the TPWD.  Don’t use widespread pesticides in your yard.  If you have to destroy fire ants, use boiling soapy water poured directly on the mound, or directly apply a bait containing Spinosad, which is not harmful to the harvester ants. 

 

Milam County has a population of horny toads, so if we can take care of our harvester ants and keep some of the county natural, just maybe, if we are really lucky, it might be possible for our great grandkids to play with Texas Horned Lizards again.