Don’t leave your clothes on the floor in the tropics is a good maxim. It only takes a few cockroaches or venomous centipedes to run out in order to make the point. A couple returning to UK from Mauritius discovered they had a fellow traveller in their baggage. After emptying the contents of their suitcase into the washing machine and washing the clothes at what must have been a modest temperature, a toad—very much still alive—was found. Local herpetologists identified and housed the accidental migrant. It was a common African species, the Guttural Toad, Sclerophrys gutturalis, introduced into Mauritius in 1922 in an attempt to control the cane beetle.
A few days later, parasitic worms were found dead in the vivarium’s water bath, the ejection of which may have followed the shock of motion in the machine and/or the ingestion of detergent. The worms were preserved and were later identified as a new species of acanthocephalan. Acanthocephalans are gut parasites. They have a spiny proboscis which is used to pierce and hold the gut wall. Their life cycles are complex involving at least two hosts. The new species was named Pseudoacanthocephalus goodmani after one of the authors of the report who collected the toad from its accidental transcontinental carriers.
The toad, incidentally, grew and lived for another four years.
Oh…and tap your shoes or boots out before putting them on. That habit was instilled, as a necessary precaution against scorpions, into my wife as a young girl in Venezuela to the extent she still did it over a decade later in the depths of the 1963 freeze in Sheffield.
Allain SJR, Goodman MJ, Wilkinson JW. 2021. A series of unlikely events: from washing machine to new species. Herpetological Bulletin 156, 47-48 doi.org/10.33256/hb156.4748
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