Unidan, AKA Ben Eisenkop, is an ecosystem ecologist who first rose to fame (infamy?) on Reddit by popping up in posts across the site, answering any queries and concepts pertaining to biology and ecology. Eisenkop will be a columnist for Upvoted, where he’ll be spotlighting a new creature every week.

Amphibians are a little weird to begin with. I think the world is divided into two camps: those who caught frogs as a kid and those who were chased around by those who caught frogs as a kid. Luckily, I was in the former camp and remain firmly entrenched in my adulthood. However, there are some frogs that even freak me out a little bit. Thusly, I present to you—the Surinam toad.

The common Surinam toad (Pipa pipa) is a primitive tongueless frog found in the jungles and marshes of South America. Before we continue, you might be asking, “But, Unidan, it’s called the Surinam toad , why do you keep saying frog? ” Well, toads are frogs! Toads are sort of a colloquial term for any members of the frog Order, Anura, that are generally terrestrial with dry skin.

Things get a little muddled, and then you get things like “true toad” groupings like the family Bufonidae, where everyone in the grouping meets the “toad” definition, but that’s a bit of an aside. What makes the Surinam toad a little confusing is that it spends much of its time in water! As for its skin, well, we’ll get to that in a minute.

The Surinam toad is an ambush hunter, lying in wait camouflaged as leaf litter at the bottom of muddied rivers and flooded forest floors. To me, they’re like predatory pancakes. When prey moves past the frog, it snaps into action, gulping up prey into its toothless maw. It needs all the energy it can get to reproduce, which is where things get really weird.

Like many other frogs, Surinam toads go through amplexus, a behavior where the male frog remains in close contact with the female, literally piggy-backing onto her, in order to be there to fertilize her eggs as they leave her body. Frogs may be a little over-paranoid when it comes to making sure their offspring is theirs, but hey, it works!

After fertilization, the eggs are scooped up onto the female’s back, which occurs in some other frog species; however, this is where things take a turn. After the eggs are in place, the female frog’s back skin begins to grow at an accelerated rate, eventually covering the eggs entirely in a new flap of flesh. This skin cover keeps the incubating eggs with the mother and helps their chances of survival.

After an incubation period of several months, the fully developed babies begin to pulsate and move under their mother’s skin and eventually burst through her back in a move that would make even Ridley Scott blush. The multitude of young funnel out through the numerous pocket holes in the female’s back and begin their new lives as toadlets. Eventually, the mother’s back skin is shed off completely and the process begins again for the next breeding season.

You can watch the lovely process below in a video from PBC, though if you’re trypophobic, you may want to look away: