Friday, May 23, 2008

Meet my frogs

Ok.  We all know by now that I'm a total Science and nature geek, right?  No surprise there.  My desk at work is a total zoo.  Literally.  I have an ant farm, about 100 praying mantises, 2 shrimp, 3 butterflies, 2 cocoons, and sproutings of venus fly trap plants.  Oh.  And I have frogs.  Yep, 2 aquatic frogs.  I got two little tadpoles the beginning of last school year.  So the kids here at school (well, and so I) could watch them turn into frogs. 

But as much as I love all of my critters, I love it even more when I get to show the kids here at school about nature and God's creation.  I LOVE it when kids get excited about science!  This makes me happy.

But anyway, back to my frogs.  When I got them, these tadpoles were about the size of my pinkie nail.  Tiny! 

Now look:

bigfrog

Ha ha!  Yeah, she's huge. 

And ummm, I found out I have a male and a female.  How do I know this?  Because they started doing this a lot:

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Ha ha!  Yeah.  Notice how much smaller the male is.  This (apparently) is normal.  The big female is named Delilah and the male is Sumo.  (Yes, I had a Samson to go with Delilah.  But sadly, he died in a tragic fake log accident.)

ANYway, so they did that for two days.  And THEN, I walked in Wednesday morning to find 1000's of EGGS!

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See all those dots?  I know they're hard to see, but they're ALL EGGS.  You can see some in the picture above that one, too.  Crazy!

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do now.  I separated some eggs (like 50) in a little bowl.  (Because I noticed that the parents were eating the eggs.) 

Starting Thursday and especially Friday, I noticed that some of the tadpoles are already hatching!  (Just two days after eggs were layed!)  They're itty bitty and curled a little bit.  They look just like this ---->  c     That's to scale and everything.  TINY! 

I know this is a terrible picture, but here is a shot of the little tadpoles.  I put that penny down there to show the scale.  You can see 2 tadpoles here.  That little line just to the left of the penny and then the line directly below the penny are the tadpoles.  There's about 50 in this jar, but you can only see those two in this picture.  Tiny!

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I have a feeling these guys are going to grow quickly!  We'll see...

2 comments:

Mary said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Mary said...

Oh, Di, that is so neat the way you can explain everything with your camea.

When I was about 8 I collected some tadpoles from a pond I used to LOVE to explore. I brought them home in a jar thinking that they would be fun to watch. I can't tell you how fast they grew legs and turned into frogs.

I GUESS they were frogs. They came from a pond. Do toads come from ponds too?