00:03Houston toad tadpoles, they're about 10 days old. Like all toads, Houston toads are laid as an egg in a
00:10long strand that's contained in jelly, and males will fertilize those eggs outside of the female's body. It's called external
00:18fertilization. Those fertilized eggs will then, the cells will start to divide, and they'll start to turn into a tadpole,
00:26and then the tadpoles will start to swim around.
00:28They'll eat, and eat, and eat, and then they'll grow legs, and then they'll start to emerge out of the
00:33water onto the land, and then they start eating little bugs, and then they just grow from there, and their
00:38skin starts to dry and get bumpy like a real toad, and they just get bigger and bigger and turn
00:43into toads.
00:52We take one male and one female, and we look at their family history, and we match them up to
01:01where they're the least related toads that we have, and we pair them up, and we get them to make
01:07eggs for us, and then we take those eggs and release them in the wild.
01:12At Houston Zoo, we've primarily been only releasing eggs, but before we can release those eggs, our veterinarians have to
01:20look at and make sure that they're disease-free, because if we do have any kind of diseases here in
01:25the zoo, we want to make sure that we don't release those diseases into the wild.
01:29So this year, we've bred about 140 pairs of toads. We have released about 800 to 900,000 eggs. My
01:39favorite part here is when we go back out to those same locations, we start to see those little baby
01:44toadlets hopping around, and it's really rewarding to see the results of all the work that we do.
01:52We'll see you next time.
