[ChromeLibrarian]

The water in my new FBT paludarium was looking a little nasty. It's filtered, etc., so it might have been perfectly safe, but it didn't look it. So I decided to do a complete water change. None of the toads were actually in the water, they were up on the land, hiding in the plantlife (if you can call plastic plants "life"), so I decided not to move them. I figure the siphon tube, plus my hands pulling out rocks to wash them, etc., will keep them spooked and up in the hides. Right?

Of course not! Responding to some eons old instinct, the call goes out. It was inaudible to you or I, but the toads obviously understood it...

"EVERYONE INTO THE POOL!"

So here I am siphoning old water out, vacuming the bottom of the tank, all the while chasing toads out of the water.

"Hey! That's an awfully big piece of debris the siphon hose has sucked up..."

It's not debris, it's a toad who got curious about the siphon hose (Is it good to eat?) Insert your choice of curse words here. Now I have to stop siphoning to remove a toad from the vacumn chamber, none the worse for the wear.

Eventually, I'm down to about a 1/4 of an inch of water, and the siphon set up stops working. Time to remove the rest by hand (by sponge, actually). Hard part's over, right?

Wrong!

Guess who decides it's time to start spawning! (Why don't you two get a room!) Now what to do? Well, they haven't actually started producing eggs, so quickly sponge out the rest of the water, wipe the tank clean, and get the new water and the rocks back in. At which point they stop!

PSYCH!

Next time I'm going to send them to Disneyland while I clean the tank...