Meet Leonard

Ok, so remember when my frogs laid eggs?  Well, I don't think I blogged about it, but all the tadpoles inexplicably died except one.

But this one little guy, dubbed "Leonard the Lonely Tadpole" by my son Cole, is going strong!  He's about three weeks old now!

See him?  What big eyes he has!

It's so funny.  Last week, I got an email from someone who apparently reads my twitters asking about Leonard and how he was holding up.  And then yesterday, the UPS guy came into see me at work.  Only, he didn't have a package for us...he was wondering how Leonard was doing.  Ha ha!

So as you can see, Leonard is doing great!  It'll be fun watching him change into a frog in the coming weeks. 

Tadpole Watch...Day 6 :)

Oh my.  LOOK how big these guys are getting!!

Compared to my last post, they're so big!  Aren't they?  And only SIX days after eggs were laid!  Before the weekend, they were just little translucent lines.  But they look like tadpoles now.  They have great big eyes, a black pigmented body, and a long gray tail.

The kids LOVE to come into my office and check them out.  Some come every day!  It's fun. 

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:

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:

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!

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!

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