It's a summer night in New Mexico. A great deluge has just swept over the desert landscape, creating ponds out of roadside ditches, once-empty watering holes, and playas. The conditions are now right for spadefoot toads to gather in these ponds and lay their eggs, all in a single night. As hundreds of male toads call for a mate, the normal stillness and silence of the desert is broken by the cacophony of their quack-like calls.
By morning, up to 2,500 eggs may have been laid by each female.
Spadefoot toads, so named for the dark, spade-like pads on their hind feet, which they use for digging, spend much of their lives underground. By lowering their metabolic rate, the toads can remain below ground for as long as two years at a time without feeding.
Once the weather turns warm and wet, spadefoots emerge to eat, mate, and lay eggs in the desert summer's ephemeral ponds. The fleeting nature of these pools necessitates rapid development. Spadefoot tadpoles can grow into toadlets in as little as fourteen days, leaving them the rest of the summer to eat and grow.
What is the meaning of cacophony as used in the passage?