Amphibians occupy a complex place in cultures around the world. Throughout history, these vibrant, shape-shifting creatures of land and water have been met with both wonder and hostility.
In the first part of this new series Amphibians and Culture, Senior Programme Officer Pria Ghosh discusses how European societies constructed negative views of amphibians through storytelling—and how shifting those narratives is central to more effective conservation in the future.
Amphibians inhabit the boundaries of worlds, crossing between environments and radically transforming between life stages in a way that has fascinated humanity for generations.
They come in all shapes and sizes, boast a stunning array of colours, and live everywhere from the desert to the rainforest. The touch of some could kill you in an instant; others are teaching us new ways to heal ourselves. Their presence signals changing weather patterns, and therefore announces times of prosperity, but also the onset of storms and floods. Their name, amphibians, literally means ‘dual life’.
It’s perhaps not surprising that people all over the world have developed a vast range of relationships, folklore, and cultural traditions surrounding these creatures of land and water.
The stunning Anaimalai flying frog is native to India’s Western Ghats, where our partner Wildlife Trust of India works to conserve multiple threatened species of amphibians. Image: © Renjith Hadlee.
From garden pond to witches’ brew: a history of cultural hostility
Here in the UK, many people will have fond memories of finding tadpoles in garden ponds and watching them turn, as if by magic, into frogs as part of a school science project. Culturally, however, amphibians have not held a particularly revered position within our national folklore—they have a long association with dark magic and witchcraft.
One of the most famous mentions of the taxon is by the witches in Macbeth, who add “eye of newt and toe of frog” to their cursed brew. In fact, amphibians crop up surprisingly often in Shakespeare’s work, reflecting contemporary beliefs about their supernatural (and often ominous) powers.
In As You Like It, the Duke compares “the uses of adversity” to “the toad, ugly and venomous, [which] wears yet a precious jewel in his head”. Here, the duke is referring to a toadstone – “stones” found in toads’ heads—were thought to alert the carrier to the presence of poison, and extract venom from bites. These toadstones (in actuality, fossilised fish teeth), were made into protective talismans throughout Europe until the 18th century.
So-called ‘toadstones’ are actually fossilised fish teeth. The myth that they originated in toad skulls persisted through the eighteenth century. Image: Baldovio CC BY-SA 3.0
‘Fire salamanders’: how superstition named a species
Europeans also attributed supernatural powers to salamanders, especially the ability to survive fire. The belief originated from how they were often seen fleeing burning logs in the hearth seemingly unscathed– a belief still reflected in the common name of fire salamanders. Asbestos, with its naturally fire-resistant properties, was thought to be ‘salamander wool’ or skin. Leonardo da Vinci himself claimed that the salamander “has no digestive organs, and gets no food but from the fire, in which it constantly renews its scaly skin.”
In direct contrast to the soothing power attributed to toadstones, salamanders were also thought to be highly toxic. Fire salamanders do secrete a neurotoxin when threatened, although it’s unlikely to cause anything more serious than skin irritation in humans. In medieval France, however, legend magnified the effects of this irritant until it was reported that salamanders could poison a well just by swimming in the water, or spoil a tree’s fruit simply by climbing the trunk.