Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Metamorphosis

Five or six weeks ago a friend from church gave us 10 tadpoles. The kids were very excited about this and I just prayed they wouldn't all die the first week. The little things proved quite hardy, however and were very fun to watch. We fed them frozen lettuce and at first had them in a large Glad container. As they grew, however, we moved them into a dishpan and added some large rocks so they could get up out of the water as they began to grow legs. You've never heard the noise like we had at our house one Sunday morning when we woke up to discover those little tadpoles had legs! Two of the tadpoles made it all the way to frogs and the rest were somewhere in between with two not having any legs, and just one died and it actually was a fully metamorphed (if that's a word) frog as well. After we had real frogs I began to fear waking up one morning with frogs all over our counter; I certainly didn't want any hopping out. Also, I had read that once they loose their tails they need some type of meat (bugs) to eat or they will begin to eat each other. We certainly didn't want to witness that so we took them to our local green way today and let them go in the creek.

Here's what they looked like at first. Here's one with two legs.
And here is a little frog. From the picture you really can't get a perspective of how tiny these things are - it's not even as big as the tip of my finger. What is really amazing is how any of these little things survive in the wild - God is certainly a wonderful creator . I couldn't believe that they knew to get up on the rocks once they had their legs and lost their tail other wise they would have drowned.
Here's Mya releasing a tadpole.
Gabriel doing the same. They insisted on catching them in the little net and releasing them one at a time.
Goodbye little tadpoles - you provided us with something to look forward to every morning, but I won't miss cleaning out your nasty water!

1 comment:

Julie said...

You are one brave momma (I feared the story would lead to one of the Egyptian plagues)- what an experience for the kids.