When fall arrives, the temperatures in Rascafría, where you can find the Threatened Amphibians of the Guadarrama Mountain Captive Breeding Center, begin to drop significantly. That is why this week we have collected all of the specimens which have spent the summer in an outdoor breeding facility in order to relocate them in an adult room, at a temperature of 21º C, for the winter.
At the start of our breeding program, we thought that maybe the midwife toads needed to undergo hibernation at low temperatures in order to be able to reproduce in the following season. In many amphibian species, the production of sperm and eggs is related to seasonal changes in ambient temperatures, but in many other species, it has been proven that production occurs throughout the year, without, apparently, changes in the temperature playing an important role.
In our case, after several tests, we concluded that toads which do not hibernate in low temperatures not only were able to reproduce normally the following spring, but also stayed in better physical shape, increasing their reproductive success.
Even so, we keep asking questions about this issue, and we think it would be more effective to tell with an outside colony, where we would not have to decide when to remove the animals from outside, extending, perhaps, the breeding period to take advantage of the Indian summers that are normally produced in the fall and early spring. We hope that in the following season we can prepare a new space in order to have a permanent outside colony, and you can be sure that we will tell you about it.