Our frog project

Every time we do a new animal project, I think it's the neatest thing we have done...then we do another one. Each new 'project' amazes me more than the last one. Up until this point, it has been butterflies and moths.  I told my neighbor across the street that we needed tadpoles in the summer.  He came through for us. When we got back from Paris, we had a handful of tadpoles waiting on us.  We started with 12. After it was all said an done, we were able to release just 1. Turns out that tadpoles are VERY picky about temperature, chemicals in the water, etc. Funny...being that they live in stagnant water huh?


This is what our little guys looked like when we got them. They were very very tiny and difficult to photograph. Throughout this whole project, I got to know my macro lens very well. It was a challenge to photograph them the whole time we had them!

It was a fun day in our house when we noticed that they were getting their legs. We had them for about 2 months before we saw the first leg. Raelee is the one that spotted it too. I argued with her for a while that it didn't have one yet, but it did....lol The first day he had legs, you could barely see them. The second day, they looked like this. It's a very fast growth when it starts happening.

I like how you can see the green starting to peek through. It looked like green glitter. So neat!

It was at this time that we figured out that we were raising Green Tree Frogs. It was interesting though, that our tadpoles had completely different coloring between the 3 of them!

The front legs emerged about a week and a half after the back legs.  The tail started re-absorbing shortly after the first. The tail was  very very interesting to watch!

Within days, it became apparent that we no longer had a tadpole, but a frog! It stopped needing to live in water, but wanted to stay out of it.

Here are our final three side by side. Isn't it neat to see them at different stages of development and different colors?

A face only a mother could love!

 

This is the only one we were able to raise and release.

It was soooo neat to be able to see a tadpole grow into a frog. We learned so much from this project...much more than we would from books or tv shows. 

Next year, our neighbor said that he would find us American Bullfrog tadpoles. I can't wait!!