Exploding toad

Macristo.

A widely-circulated urban legend claims that you can explode a toad by putting a cigarette in its mouth because toads inhale through their mouths but they exhale through their skin. If the air is too polluted this process cannot be completed and the gases continue to build up until they explode. This is not true: frogs and toads are amphibians, and even though amphibian skin can perform gas exchange, it is unrelated to lung expiration (see: buccal pumping). Even if the frog or toad keeps performing non-stop inhalation, which is impossible anyway, the air would not build up in its body and cause it to explode.

The experimental music group Coil wrote a song called "Omlagus Garfungiloops" that features a voice sample saying "Have you been exploding frogs again?". The title of the song is based on taking the above voice sample and playing parts of it backwards to achieve a strange non-language.

In the Playstation game Final Fantasy Tactics, Malak sends a toad to give Ramza a message. The toad explodes and startles Ramza after it stops talking.

In the background of the game Warhammer 40,000, one of the many deadly creatures that inhabits the Death World of Catachan is the Great (and Lesser) Catachan Barking Toad, which when threatened, explodes into a cloud of toxins that kills all life in the immediate area, an area that can stretch for a kilometer, in the case of the Great Barking Toad.

In the computer game Marathon 2: Durandal and subsequent titles, the assimilated BoBs, who try to kill the player by exploding, will sometimes yell "Frog blast the vent core!"

In the DreamWorks animated feature film Shrek, a toad (and a snake) are inflated as balloons by Shrek and Fiona. They do not explode, but as a result of Fiona's high-pitched singing, a bird does.

The game Thief 2 includes Frogbeast Eggs as a weapon that Garrett, the main character, can use. They release small frogs, which hop towards the nearest person (possibly including Garrett himself) and explode.

In the 2003 comic book to film adaptation Hulk, a failed experiment on regenerative healing causes a frog to explode. This causes Bruce Banner to quip, "You want to go to the review board on Monday and tell them we have developed a brand new method for exploding frogs?"

In a number of popular mods to the popular science fiction action game Half-Life, one-eyed Chumtoads that may explode and sometimes also spit poison are added as a monster type. Sometimes these are also usable as weapons in the same manner as the Snark.

In the computer game Serious Sam, froglike alien amphibians hop toward the player and explode on contact. Although individually weak and easily killed, these enemies often appear in large swarms.

References

v t e Exploding organisms
Topics	Autothysis Exploding animal Exploding human Exploding whale Exploding rats Exploding donkey Exploding ants Exploding toads Bat bomb Anti-tank dog Exploding tree Exploding watermelon Animal-borne bomb attacks
See also	Exploding Kittens Exploding White Mice Exploding dog Exploding cigar Exploding lake Exploding head syndrome