Some of them were starting to grow their back legs.
Their transition to froghood seems to happen by shrinking away the extra stuff, rather than growing legs and arms. Here's one that is in the awkward phase between poledom and frogdom.
When they reach this stage, with nicely shaped arms and legs, there tail gets absorbed and they become little frogs. It takes less than a day from this point. They're also very awkward looking at this stage. Especially when they try to swim. Their arms and legs are flailing around and their shrinking tail is getting less and less effective.
At some point, they all seem to come to the conclusion that it would be easier if they just get out of the water.
They seem to rest for a day and do nothing but recover. Then they are able to swim around like frogs, kicking their powerful backlegs like a frog is supposed to. And they hop of course.
Apparently, they also realize that not only can they walk and hop, but they can climb the glass wall of the aquarium. We had to seperate them into a tadpole tank and a frog tank that is covered on the top. They're getting to the point where we are trying to figure out where to leave them. Conventional wisdom says to bring them back to the pond they came from, but the tire-track puddle doesn't seem to be a very good option, especially because somebody else drove through it again the other day.
Anyways, Rock on.
Keith.
2 comments:
Too cool!
Pretty in depth observations. I've always like frogs. On a related note, I've been fascinated with a Yellow garden spider that made its web outide our backyard window. I noticed it was gone last week, but with the web still intact, maybe becoming a victim to a bird. We saw it hanging around for at least 6 weeks, during which time it doubled in size, but apparently not long enough to make a web sac and become immortal.
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