We have tadpoles!...

After leaving his bag of pond water behind last week, we made a second trip to my friend's pond to collect frog eggs. Turns out, Chad only collected some slime last time, so it was a good thing we waited. This time, the eggs all had black specks in the center and were easier to see. We collected a bunch, along with one little Spring Peeper frog, and brought them home. Two days later, they have all hatched into teeny little tadpoles.

It's pretty hard to see with the crappy glass reflection and they are sooo tiny. See those little black lines near the bottom? That's them. They just kind of hang there most of the time and aren't very interesting, but it's still exciting to think of frogs growing from little aquatic swimmers right here in my aquarium. That grody rust colored blob in the corner is the rock the eggs were attached to in the pond. We just snagged the whole thing and added the bucket of pond water we brought it home in to the tank.

We're feeding them algae tablets from the pet store until they're bigger. The frog was not posing for pictures today, but he's in there somewhere. He's getting a steady diet of crickets and ants from the yard, but we'll be sending him off to freedom very soon, against the wishes of my children. We're watching tadpoles grow, but we do not keep wild creatures as pets.

Today I blew 40 bucks at the pet store on a UVA/UVB light the guy insisted reptiles and amphibians need to properly digest nutrients, and a basking platform for them to crawl up on when they get their legs. I probably got boned on that one since the people at the pet store were giving me this whole line about tree frogs needing a super-humid environment and tried to get me to purchase heat lamps and spray bottles and stuff. I told them they're not tropical tree frogs, we found them in a pond. You know, here in Iowa, a.k.a. temperate. The lady gave me a weird look and handed me a pamphlet about tree frogs, saying everything in there applied to my frogs, but the pamphlet was for Red Bellied Somethings from the Amazon, Habitat: tropical. Idiots. We've probably got at least 15 tadpoles in our ten gallon tank. MamaB, do you still want a few?

If you order tadpoles, they come with instructions. I got some great info on this website about how to raise tadpoles, in case anyone else is doing it the old fashioned way and frognapping them from a pond.

I'm trying to figure out how to get decent pictures of these things for our reports. Any ideas?

P.S. RegularMom, is this froggy enough for an honorable mention or a brownie or something? I mean they're not anywhere close to Giant, but they are pretty much just Frog Heads with a little waggly neck at this point.