Meet the bizarre toad that ‘sees’ with its fingertips and gives birth through holes in its back — and more UCLA media

CBC Radio covered a new study by UCLA neurobiologist Duncan Leitch and his colleagues that found the Surinam toad — commonly called a star-fingered toad — uses its fingertips to sense tiny movements in the water made by nearby prey. “Frogs have four fingers on their hands,” Leitch told “Quirks & Quarks” host Bob McDonald. “Those [fingers] split into four different lobes on each of the fingertips, and then, subsequently, each of those lobes split four times again in sort of this fractural pattern.” Read more about UCLA in today’s Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and others.