metamorphosis
Aug 1st, 2011 by woodstone
A couple of weeks ago, after d-a-y-s of rain, I started hearing an unfamiliar noise at night. It started about 10:00 at lasted late into the night…
We are used to animal noises in the night… it’s common to hear coyotes howling, the baby deer crying, the neighborhood livestock neighing, braying, moo-ing, crowing, trilling, baaa-ing, cackling and quacking. We even have a neighbor with a pig and if it was quiet enough I’m guessing we could hear his piggy grunting.
But this was a sound I couldn’t remember hearing before… It took a few minutes before I realized it was frogs, and from the sounds of things LOTS of frogs!
Our gully used to be a small stream, and the dry lake bed just west of the house is… well.. a dry lake bed and used to be filled with water. But for decades now there hasn’t been surface water within a couple of miles of us. So… no frogs.
Until now.
R and I went searching for them late one evening, but needless to say, couldn’t find them. Luckily they found us…
They’d laid hundreds (thousands?) of eggs in a large puddle on our next door neighbor’s land… a puddle that started drying up about the time the eggs hatched into tadpoles.
That’s how we acquired a bucketful of tadpoles.
Being homeschoolers I was thrilled to have them… it looked like a wonderful review of metamorphosis. Thanks to plenty of milkweed in the gully, we’ve raised Monarch butterflies almost every year… but we’ve never raised any tadpoles.
We put together a small habitat for them and they seem to be doing quite well on goldfish food with some scraps of algae pellets.
I love seeing their tiny legs emerge… Our biggest one is definitely starting to look frog-like.
We are guessing they are western chorus frogs, but don’t really know for sure.
R wants to keep them forever, of course…
…but once they start hopping they may have to relocate to a lovely stream that’s not far away. (R may have to visit them there!)
I believe that we still have some fish food from Myth that you could have for your frogs… Myth passed away last month from unknown causes…he didn’t even look sick to me.
Yup, we have two containers. Let me know if you need them.
That post brought back loads of memories. I’m sure you can remember when I had tadpoles. I thought they were great but they always seemed to jump out of the tank once they got limbs.
I remember one jumped out of the tank and somehow crawled into Lorens jacket pocket and died. It wasn’t found until months later when Loren put his hand into his jacket and pulled out a mummified frog. Of course everyone thought I had put it there and I got in trouble. I can’t blame them really, I was innocent this time but it was something I would have done.
I think the poor frog knew Loren was a outdoorsy kid and thought it would hitch a lift to the outside world and to freedom but simply choose the wrong jacket.
[...] metamorphosis - Maura shares her children’s interesting find of a pond of tadpoles. Wonderful pictures of tadpoles transforming into frogs [...]