Born Free

Most of our little tadpoles have grown up and turned into frogs… or become frog bait themselves. When we see four legs and no tail, we've been releasing the froglets into the back yard to live our their little froggy lives. They appear to be tiny tree frogs to me, but it's a bit hard to tell since they are so small.

It seems like ages ago that Tropical Storm Fay came through and flooded our yard, giving the boys the grand idea to hunt for tadpoles. It's been a great evolutionary lesson for the boys and sadly there are only one or two late bloomers left in our tadpole habitat, so I'd call our tadpole adventures about over. I'd recommend this to anyone with little kids because mine have learned so much from the whole experience.

Born free…as free as the tadpoles
As free as the frog grows
Free to follow your heart

Is it wrong that I kind of miss the little guys swimming around in that box on the patio? Besides, I now have a freezer full of frozen bloodworms and no one to eat them.

Holy Froglets!

We had another brilliant evolutionary marvel greet us this morning. Two of our tadpoles made the transformation into froglets last night. We spent a considerable amount of time yesterday peering into the frog habitat looking at the tadpoles and discussing which ones had back legs, which ones were breathing air, which ones still had gills and were breathing water and which ones were the biggest. I assure you that if any of them had front legs yesterday they were hiding them from us and our bug magnifying glass.
This morning I went out to check on them and there were two little froglets in there - complete with big back and front legs! Their tails seem to be getting smaller too, so I'd say the transformation is almost complete. The boys went screaming inside to the house to get Farmer B and show him the froglets.
I'm really glad we put a big rock in their habitat because that's where the two froglets are spending most of their time. As soon as they lose their tails we'll have to release them out into the wild, I suppose. It's sad because I know they'll become bird-bait pretty quickly. Our ditches and ponds are filled with large herons and cranes that pick off froglets and tadpoles all day long. We still have a nice handful of tadpoles who are a bit behind in the metamorphosis process, so we've got more froglets ahead of us.

I read that froglets have a wide mouth an no lips, which enables them to eat insects, worms and even other tadpoles. Egads! It takes most species of frogs 2 to 3 years to grow to their full adult size. I'll admit, I've gotten used to having these guys around. I'd love to have a real aquarium and be able to keep them for just a little bit longer so they could get bigger and have a better chance in the wild, but it looks like their number is up and we'll have to release them pretty soon.

Update: It's nighttime now and the little froglet you see in the top photo is now tail-less. He is 100% frog now and hopping all around the habitat. And I saw a little tadpole cannibalism tonight. I'm feeding them according to schedule, but I guess it's what happens in the whole circle of tadpole life. I gave them extra lettuce though tonight...just in case.

He's got legs and he knows how to use them...

A miraculous thing happened overnight in our eco-unfriendly Styrofoam tadpole habitat - some of the little tadpoles grew legs! I know that tadpoles go through the exciting metamorphosis into frogs on a daily basis all over the world, but to witness it happening on our own patio is really quite cool. I'm so happy that our boys are learning about this process and seem quite intrigued with the whole thing. It's a great way to open up the dialog into evolution and how all creatures evolved.
To give the boys a closer look I dip a glass into the water to scoop out some tadpoles, let them oogle for a minute or two and dump them back in. I figure the tadpoles are none the worse for wear and if they'd been left in the wild they'd probably be bird food by now anyway.

The boys are fascinated with the two tadpoles that have tiny little legs. They noticed that these tadpoles are also taking breaths of air from the surface instead of using their gills to breathe oxygen from the water.
I learned from our tadpole literature that tadpoles breathe through gills. Lungs develop around the time of leg development and tadpoles at this stage of development will usually be found near the surface of the water where they breathe air. During the final stages of external metamorphosis, the tadpole's mouth changes from a small enclosed mouth at the front of the head to a large mouth the same width as the head. The intestines shorten to make way for the new diet. It's amazing to think that all this is going on in these tiny little creatures on the patio.

We still have some little tadpoles that are behind the ball in the metamorphosis game. They're much smaller and show no signs of legs. It's actually good because we can compare these tadpoles with the new "leggy" tadpoles in a little preschool game of compare and contrast.
We also put a large landscaping rock into their habitat so the new leggy tadpoles will have somewhere to perch. And last week I hooked up an old aquarium pump I found from my college days and I run it for an hour or two a day to pump some extra O2 into the water. (I used to have a 1-gallon fish tank where I had two pet goldfish that lived for about 4 years. I had no clue that $3 goldfish could last that long, but they did. Their names were Chauntecleer and Pertelote, from the two chickens in the Nun's Priest's Tale from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.) You should be able to click on any of the photos above and get a close-up view of the tadpoles. You should just be able to make out the legs on the 1st, 2nd and 5th photos. The 3rd and 4th photos are the younger ones. They're tiny and quite transparent, but they're there! I'm not on a quest to find out if tadpoles experience any pain from the metamorphosis process… just out of curiosity…does it hurt to grow legs?

Eat the Bloody Worms!

I recently had a bit of a disaster cooking up some lettuce for the tadpoles. You're supposed to boil the lettuce for 10 to 15 minutes before serving it to tadpoles. I'm not sure if it's to make it more tender for them or to wash away any pesticides that might be on it since tadpoles are very susceptible to toxins, but every site says to boil it, so we boil it. I put the lettuce in and about an hour later Farmer B asked me what had died in a pot on the stove. It actually turns into this weird translucent material that goes right through a sieve if you leave it there that long.

I was feeling guilty about this the other day when I was at PetsMart and I remembered reading that tadpoles like bloodworms. The idea of this didn't appeal to me but I thought I should take a look at the bloodworms to see how bad they were. Turns out they're frozen into little red cubes about the size of a dice. They come in a sheet of foil and you just punch a cube of bloodworms out when you need one, like popping out a cold pill from a foil pack. I thought I could handle that, so I spent about $4 and bought a pack. Then we drove to Chuck E Cheese for a rare treat for the boys…until I remembered that I had a frozen sheet of bloodworms in the car. I couldn't bare the thought of them defrosting in the car so I put them in my purse and spent an hour chasing the boys around Chuck E Cheese with a purse-full of frozen bloody worms. ((shudder))

The boys are definitely intrigued with them. The name "bloodworm" just appeals to kids. I have zero interest in researching bloodworms to find out about them because I know I couldn’t handle it. When we got home, I cut a cube in half and dropped both pieces into opposite ends of the tadpoles' little watery home. Don't forget that we have "tannic" water, which explains the color of the water in the box. It was pretty gross because as the cubes start to defrost in the water, little red worms start to fall away from the cube and then the whole mess of worms falls to the bottom. I have a worm phobia so this was really vile to me. Then the tadpoles started to devour these frosty little things like piranhas on a carcass.
The tadpoles really liked them from the looks of it and two even got into a little fight over one - kind of reminded me of a very gross tadpole version of the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp.

So now a nightly discussion in the house is whether we boil up some lettuce or defrost some bloody worms.

I'm convinced if our garden had grown I would NOT be doing this.

Spackle Frog and the 'Poles

We're still recovering from Tropical Storm Fay and part of our recovery involves Farmer B scoping the outside of the house for cracks in the stucco. The "experts" on TV said that most of the minor house flooding in Central FL caused by T.S. Fay was from rain coming in through cracks in the stucco of people's homes. So with three more tropical systems in the Atlantic heading westward, ever-responsible Farmer B decided that all of our stucco cracks must be filled immediately with stucco spackle. He'd been out there awhile when he came in and told me that a tree frog was sitting in one of the stucco cracks and that he couldn’t figure out how to get him out. I told him to just pull him out and toss him in the swampy grass where he could hop off and find another home. Farmer B agreed and went back outside.

Then he came in again and said that it worked and that the frog was free and he spackled over the crack. But then another frog poked his head out - a spackle-covered frog. Apparently there were two frogs in there. So I grabbed my wellies and a yellow bucket and ran outside to de-spackle the frog. Farmer B managed to pull it out and into the bucket and then tossed the bucket to me. The poor thing was covered in spackle - white gooey sticky spackle. I don't have any pictures of this because my first instinct was to wash him off and not grab the camera.

I washed him off and let him sit in a little puddle of water in the bucket for a few minutes to help clean off his skin.

He was not hopping especially fast when I put him on the ground to stretch his spackle-covered legs, so hopefully he was just a bit scared.

I managed to completely de-spackle him and rinse him off and he looked good as new. I hope he recovers and finds his froggy friend from the crack-home they enjoyed before the spackle-incident.

On a tadpole note, we have moved the tadpoles into a large Styrofoam cooler. I am aware of how eco-unfriendly that sounds, but the cooler contained some food products that came in the mail as a birthday present for Farmer B, so at least we're finding a way to reuse the Styrofoam box, right? The water the tadpoles were swimming in was very dark water. In Florida we have tannic water - this refers to darkened water dyed from the tannin in local leaves. It's clean enough water, but looks a bit murky and is perfect for gators. I filled up a few inches of the cooler with tap water and then left it in the sun for 24 hours so that all the chlorine and other toxins in the water would evaporate into the air from the sun's heat. Then I dumped the bucket of tadpoles in their tannic water into the clear water of the Styrofoam container… so they'd still have some of their own familiar water.

We've been feeding them boiled lettuce and they seem to love it. I read online that tadpoles love lettuce, so that's what we're sticking with for now. We don't have any rocks or "land" in the container yet because none of the tadpoles have sprouted legs so far.

Oh and yesterday - Labor Day - I made it out to the garden to see how things have recovered now that the soil is starting to dry out. It ain't pretty. More to come.

Polywog in a Bog

Since we're still swimming around here, I thought I'd dedicate another post to the amphibians in our yard who are at least enjoying all the excess water. In my attempt to look on the bright side, happy frogs is all I can come up with.

This little tree frog likes to hang around our pool safety fence. We have a few more who love to hang out on our front door and kitchen window. The ones on the front door like to jump at your face when you open the door. That's always good fun.

We recently had an explosion of baby tree frogs. They all cling to the windows early in the morning and are downright fascinating to the boys. They're so little that they're almost transparent.



And here is the toad who lives in our garden. Well...he did live in the garden. I haven't seen him since it flooded. I think he's our first space toad.
And finally - the best frog-related song out there! My boys love their new Barenakes Ladies CD called "Snacktime." It's got a bunch of great music on there that's fun for the kids and not painful for me to listen to. One of the favorites is Polywog in a Bog . You can watch the music video for it here. This video is featured on CNET and on download.com's best new music videos page. It includes a really cute animation of a tadpole turning into a frog during the best part of the song. If you've got kids, they'll love this. They should listen to it while doing their tadpole-to-frog crafts to get into a froggy kind of mood. Enjoy!

Metamorphosis Lesson

Since the garden needs to drain for awhile - a long while, we needed to find another nature outlet to occupy the boys. Farmer B spent most of the evening yesterday digging a trench from the corner of our front yard between the two septic drainfield humps and out to our front ditch. It's surprising how fast the water is flowing through this small trench and it's really helping to lower the water level around the house. Farmer B has a sore back and blisters on his hands as a reward for doing this…and once again, I got tired just watching him. Our big fantasy is that we can walk through our back yard instead of wading though it. How your priorities can change overnight.

With all of the rain, we've got more frogs than you can imagine. And this newly-dug ditch is now home to an entire army of tadpoles. We thought it would be fun to give the boys some buckets and see if they could catch a few. Afterall, gathering buckets of tadpoles is a rite of passage for kids. You'd be hard pressed to find an adult who didn't spend at least one afternoon in their youth dipping a bucket in some nasty water to fish out a tadpole or two. So it was our turn to take the plunge. There is something about gross brown storm runoff water that doesn't appeal to me, but the boys didn't seem to mind. The boys had a good time getting dirty, as all kids do, and we now have two overflowing buckets filled with murky brown water and tadpoles. Jace always manages to find a spot that's just slightly deeper than the top of his wellies. That's a special knack of his. He was less interested in getting tadpoles than he was dumping out water over and over again.
Aidan was very serious about his catching technique. He preferred the sneak approach and then he'd slam his bucket in the water and scream "Take that, tadpoles!" Somehow he caught a small fish in his bucket too, which we cannot figure out. How we ended up with a fish swimming in our front yard storm water runoff is a mystery. There's not even a lake or river next to the house that would explain the fish. I guess it just really did rain that much.
Hopefully we'll keep some of these little guys for awhile and see if they sprout legs. We'll let them go when they get bigger to live out their froggy lives in the great outdoors. That is, if they ARE frogs. I've been reading up on tadpoles and it turns out that these might be toad tadpoles. If indeed they are toads, we can have some more residents for our Space Toad House. I read that toad tadpoles are usually small and black and frog tadpoles are larger not black. These all appear small and black, but I guess we'll have a better clue when they start to grow.
Since we're always trying to sneak learning in wherever we can, we found some great online resources for learning about tadpoles and the metamorphosis process. We'll be using all these this week with the boys while we talk about our new tadpoles.

Grow-a-Frog Learning Guide - This is a 20-page teacher's manual all about frogs and their life cycle. This is a homeschooling mom's dream lesson plan guide.

Tadpole to Frog cut-out transformation activity - Color in the parts, cut them out and you can act out the metamorphosis with your very own paper frog. Aidan colored in our frog and I cut him out. We didn't have the special clips it suggested for the frog parts, so we're just taping them on as we go. So far our frog only has a tail since we have tadpoles, but we'll soon add rear legs when they become froglets, then front legs, then we'll rip off the tail.

How to raise toads for organic gardening - How to catch a toad and make him happy in your garden.

All About Frogs - Including kids activities and coloring pages.

Frog Life Cycle coloring page - Love this!

Something Froggy- Online frog guide. This is really well done and has two different books depending on the age group of the child.