THE FROG-ACADEMY

WE HAVE MORE BABIES!!

In our little make-shift fish-tank pond we have baby frogs
J . Last night we saw the first one - the one in the picture, and today we saw three more. There may be more yet as we have lots of very fat tadpoles which may still develop. The frogs we have are varying in tail length from none (this one - which the kids have named 'Amphi' - hmmm - that's original J), to still quite long, so I'm guessing they have not long morphed and we may have lots more morphing to come! So now we need to feed them and in a week or so may need to return them to the stream from whence they came before they start hopping all over the garden and thinking they can head back here to breed next year! I think we'll keep the breeding in the stream J

We really didn't do much for this pond except make it as much like a natural pond as possible, which wasn't hard with an outside tank. There has been an ample supply of natural rain-water (except for the odd dechlorinated top-ups at the beginning when we had a few hot weeks), to the point of needing to remove some water as tadpoles apparently like it shallow and spacious as opposed to deep and confined. We added; (1) a bit of original-pond weed that has survived well and which came with it's own supply of pond creatures to boot, including water snails, weird things with shells (like leaf shaped crabs - very strange looking things) and other minions of water mini-bugs which have made great fodder for the bigger tads and froglets. (2) lots of silty mud which the tad's like to burrow down into at the bottom of the tank. It came in off the stones from our garden which the toddlers seemed to think were a necessary addition, no matter how hard I tried to stop them (from fear of contaminating the tank)! And (3) the odd feed of goldfish food (apparently tad's love it - they did seem to J - and it apparently prevents them eating each other as it is a good source of protein for the froglets, and now (4) fruit flies for the mini-frogs, attracted by a few ant-eaten strawberries growing/rotting in the flower bed nearby!

The frog is so small he was very hard to photograph, but I hope you can see him OK J