Amphibians Honor

Anyone who has camped near a marsh knows the chorus that starts when it gets dark. That noise is the doorway to the Pathfinder Amphibians honor, one of the Nature Study achievements of the Pathfinder Club of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, which asks you to get to know toads, frogs, tree frogs, salamanders and caecilians up close.

As the Pathfinder Club Administrative Manual of the South American Division (DSA) asks, this guide covers the content broadly, drawing on sources such as Brazil's Butantan Institute and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), so that you can write your own answers. The official wording of each item is on the page with the full requirements of the Amphibians honor.

🐸What does the Pathfinder Amphibians honor require?

The Amphibians honor has the code EN-023 and belongs to the Nature Study area. The catalog lists it as level 2, created in 1945 by the General Conference, with 11 requirements: nine study items and two hands-on ones.

It also counts toward a class. On the card for the Companion class, the class for 11-year-olds, the Nature Study section asks for one honor out of eight options, and Amphibians tops the list. The table sums up each requirement, with no answers.

Summary of catalog entry EN-023; official wording on the honor's page.

🔬What are the characteristics of amphibians and their three orders?

In most species, life has two stages: an aquatic larva, called a tadpole in anurans, and a land-dwelling adult after metamorphosis. According to the UFRGS Herpetology Laboratory, the skin is permeable, works as the main breathing organ, stays moist thanks to mucous glands and holds poison glands. Amphibians are ectotherms that depend on heat from their surroundings, and their eggs have no shell.

Brazil has more amphibian species than any other country. The 2021 list of the Brazilian Herpetological Society (SBH) recorded 1,188, and Guinness World Records cites at least 1,222 in 2023.

Brazil's five salamanders belong to the genus Bolitoglossa, in the family of lungless salamanders, which breathe through the skin and the lining of the mouth, according to AmphibiaWeb, at the University of California. In Brazil, caecilians are nicknamed cobras-cegas, meaning blind snakes, because they have no legs and live underground; to tell real snakes apart, see the Reptiles honor guide.

Sources: AmphibiaWeb (count of October 6, 2026); SBH list (Segalla and colleagues, 2021); UFRGS.

🔍What is the difference between a toad, a frog and a tree frog?

Toad, frog and tree frog (sapo, rã and perereca in Brazil) are common names, all for anurans, a word from Greek that means tailless. And, despite a popular belief in Brazil, the frog is not the female toad: the Butantan Institute points out that all three groups have males and females.

In Brazil, the best-known toad is the cururu, a Tupi name for toads of the genus Rhinella, with more than 30 species in the country; the Amazonian Rhinella marina, the cane toad, can reach 1 kg. The frog served in restaurants is the American bullfrog (Aquarana catesbeiana), native to the United States and Canada and listed by the SBH as invasive. Brazil has more than 350 species of tree frogs.

Source: Butantan Institute (July 11, 2024 and June 27, 2025), with guidance from researcher Carlos Jared.

🛡️How do amphibians protect themselves?

The first line of defense is the skin. In toads, the poison sits in glands and only comes out when a predator bites or squeezes: this is the passive defense described by Butantan, in which the toad simply inflates its lungs to expose the glands. The mix contains hundreds of substances, from alkaloids to peptides. That is why the rule is to classify amphibians as poisonous, not venomous. Carlos Jared's group at Butantan described the exceptions: caecilians also have venom glands in their teeth, and the perereca-de-capacete (Corythomantis greeningi), a tree frog of the Caatinga, injects venom by head-butting, using spines on its skull.

Other strategies round out the arsenal:

• Warning colors. The sapo-ponta-de-flecha (Adelphobates galactonotus), a poison dart frog from the Amazon, measures 3 to 4 cm, shows orange, yellow, red or blue and gets its alkaloids from the ants and termites it eats.
• Playing dead. The perereca-de-folhagem (Phyllomedusa burmeisteri), a leaf frog of the Atlantic Forest, hides among the leaves and, when threatened, freezes in place, a behavior called thanatosis.

Warning colors and disguises show up in many animals, as the article on animal camouflage explains.

🔄What is the life cycle of a toad, from egg to adult?

In the cururu toad, the female lays shell-less eggs in the pond, in strings that look like a ribbon. The tadpoles breathe through gills, swim with their tails and usually eat algae, which they filter from the water or scrape off stones and leaves, according to the Revista Brasileira de Zoologia.

Metamorphosis is driven by thyroid hormones: the hind legs grow first, and the tail only shrinks once the legs have taken over swimming (Frontiers in Endocrinology, 2019). Gills and tail are reabsorbed, and the adult starts breathing through its lungs and skin, returning to the water only to breed.

Anurans vary a lot: in 2005, Brazilian researchers Célio Haddad and Cynthia Prado proposed ten new reproductive modes, bringing the known total for the group to 39. The perereca-de-folhagem lays its eggs in leaves rolled into a funnel, hanging over the edge of ponds, and the tadpoles drop into the water, according to the Zoology Museum of the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV). Some species even hatch without going through a tadpole stage.

And when the water disappears? In the semi-arid backlands (sertão) of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, the frog Pleurodema diplolistris spends 10 or 11 months a year buried in the sand, without eating, in estivation, the summer equivalent of hibernation. During that period, its resting oxygen consumption drops by half, according to Revista Pesquisa FAPESP.

🎶How do frogs and toads croak, and what do they eat?

Each species has its own call. The advertisement call, made by males, serves mainly to attract females of the same species, UFRGS explains. Calling comes at a cost: the sound also guides predators, such as the bats that locate males by their calls. Luís Felipe Toledo, of the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), and colleagues sorted the calls into three categories: reproductive, aggressive and defensive.

The volume comes from the vocal sac, an elastic structure through which air flows during the call, amplifying the sound, according to a study published in 2023 in the scientific journal Phyllomedusa. It can be single, paired or absent. In the cururu toad, the female tends to be larger and to lack a vocal sac.

Adults hunt mostly insects and other invertebrates, sometimes small vertebrates. The Georgia Institute of Technology, in the United States, measured a frog tongue ten times softer than a human tongue, faster than a blink and with saliva that thickens on the way back. Even the eyes help: in 2004, a study showed that the northern leopard frog retracts its eyes to push prey down its throat.

🌎What is the economic value of amphibians and what threatens them?

Amphibians eat large numbers of invertebrates and help control pests, UFRGS notes, and cururu toads were even taken to Asia and the United States in attempts to control crop pests. Australia shows the risk: in 1935, it brought in 102 toads from Hawaii against cane beetles and released 2,400 without any known test of whether they would eat the beetles. Today the cane toad is an established pest there, according to the Australian program PestSmart.

The skin also interests medicine: in March 2026, the Butantan Institute announced peptides with antibiotic potential, flagged by computer analysis, in the poison of the Amazonian cururu toad Rhaebo guttatus (journal Toxicon). The American bullfrog is raised on frog farms for food. And because they are sensitive to changes in the environment, toads, frogs and tree frogs work as indicators of a healthy ecosystem, according to Butantan.

Among the threats to amphibians, UFRGS lists habitat loss, exotic species, polluted water, disease and climate change. The worst disease is chytridiomycosis, caused by fungi of the genus Batrachochytrium; B. dendrobatidis, which attacks all three groups of amphibians, is the only one of the two recorded in Brazil so far, according to Agência FAPESP. A study published in the journal Science in 2019 linked the disease to the decline of at least 501 species, with about 90 extinctions. In Brazil, at least 50 species or populations were affected, mostly in the Atlantic Forest, co-author Luís Felipe Toledo told Agência FAPESP.

This richness places on us the duty to protect these species.Brazil's National Center for Research and Conservation of Reptiles and Amphibians (RAN/ICMBio), quoted by the Butantan Institute, 2024 (our translation from Portuguese)

✅How do you earn the Amphibians honor (and the advanced one)?

The 10-species collection accepts photos or images from books and the internet. Choose species from your state and note the common name, scientific name, order, family and source of each image. Your own photos are the best route, as long as you do not capture the animal.

For the 15 minutes of observation, look for a pond or a marsh after rain, early in the evening, always with an adult. Record date, time, place, weather and behavior in the format of the Pathfinder field notebook. The requirement also accepts captive animals, such as zoos and museums with amphibians on display.

In your Unit, a listening night, recording calls on a phone, and a model of the tadpole life cycle make good meetings. Common mistakes: calling the frog the female toad, treating the caecilian as a snake and taking tadpoles home. A ready-made file does not count either: the Administrative Manual forbids answered honor worksheets, especially those from the internet.

Next comes the Advanced Amphibians honor (EN-054), level 3, created in 2001, which requires the basic honor and ends with a simple research project. Before you start, go over the full requirements of the Amphibians honor with your Instructor.