Surinam toad

It has no tongue and no teeth. To eat, it throws open its mouth so fast that the water rushing in carries the prey with it, the whole movement finished in twelve to twenty-four thousandths of a second. The star-shaped tips on its front fingers are what find the food in muddy water.

Nothing about the birth is metaphorical. The male presses the fertilised eggs onto the female's back during mating, the skin grows over them, and the young develop in those pockets until they push out as complete little toads.

It is built like something run over. The body is almost perfectly flat and the head is a broad triangle, which is camouflage: in murky water at the bottom of a river it reads as a dead leaf.

The male sings underwater by clicking, a sound made with a bony structure in the larynx rather than by moving air the way a calling frog does.

This photograph is a wild animal at night in Manuripi, Bolivia, and it is flash-lit and orange because of it. Almost every other available image of this species is a museum specimen.