Even though they are buried several feet below the desert's scorched sand for most of the year, spadefoot toads, Scaphiopus couchii, definitely feel the rain when it comes. Remarkably, they feel it even though they cannot see it and they are not touched by it.

The beginning of Richard Tinsley's interest in the spadefoot toad, and Pseudodiplorchis americanus, a monogenetic trematode infecting the toad's urinary bladder, began in the late 1960s while he working on his Ph. D. at the University of Leeds in England. It was then, very early in his career, that he came across a publication written in 1940 for an obscure journal (The Wassman Collector) by L. O. Rodgers and Bob Kuntz. In this one and a half paged paper, Rodgers and Kuntz had described P. americanus, but nothing about the biology of the extraordinary interaction between this parasite and its host. Richard said, however, holding a now yellowed Xerox copy of the paper in his Bristol office, “There is enough in here [in the Rodgers/Kuntz paper] to show that there is an exciting story to be told. First of all it's a monogenean. Then, with my interests in this group of vertebrates, I knew that its host was completely terrestrial. But, I knew that the toad returned to water for a very short time each year.