Back in April, we received our tadpoles from Uncle Milton. The girls named them Ty and Trevor; Trevor promptly died.
Ty is apparently a classic case of arrested development. He's still a happy tadpole. He's gotten a little pudgier, and we keep thinking we see the buds of little legs (wishful thinking?) but nothing has happened. Atticus thinks these things just don't do well in captivity.
Anyone else with tadpole experience? Are we doing something wrong? According to Uncle Milton, we should have had a frog within a month. Ty is either stubborn or stunted. Anyone? Anyone?
4 comments:
Karen,
Joel and I have been very successful in raising (I'm not sure the term applies :) from tadpoles to frogs. Each spring a boy in Blythe's Trinity class brought us roughly 50 tadpoles. We placed them in a disposable metal cake pan and put them on the porch. We fed them grass, bread crumbs and whatever else Joel threw in the pan. Most of the time we made sure they had water. Sometimes it got a little low and dozens died. When we started to see legs and arms we made sure large rocks were placed near the edge of the pan so that they could hop out when the were ready. I would say that between 2 and 5 of the little guys made it to maturity. It is rather sad to see the little guys die, but I guess that is life as a tadpole/frog. I think it was the combination of negligence and the bread crumbs that made it work
Lisa
Ah, negligence and bread crumbs ... we've been going about this in the wrong way! We've been hovering and feeding them the tadpole equivalent of Science Diet. :-)
And, even with your high-end 10% survival rate, clearly we can't expect more than 1/5 of a frog. I wonder which fifth we'll get ....
I remember catching tadpoles and attempting to raise them up to be frogs. My recollection is that a 10% survival rate is about the norm for ones raised in a jar anyway. Of course since we dissected the only one I remember actually getting to maturity, I guess they didn't have any compelling reason for sticking around or growing legs...You'd never have guessed that I would have spent most of the rest of my educational career "allergic" to science. y we were heatless mad scientists in 8th grade!
Good luck with Ty. Maybe if you reassure him that no one is going to open him up to examine his internal organs he'll get on with the business of growing. Then again, I'm not sure how one communicates with a tadpole.
We had one of those and didn't have any luck with it-- I think there is not enough water for the large tadpoles you get with the coupon. We did better using a large clear glass cookie jar and tadpoles we got from a pond-- we probably had a quart or two if water in there. This year, we got our tadpoles on the late end (a couple already had back legs) and we got 5 out of 5 to make it to froghood. These were small frogs, about 3/8" long when we let them go. We replaced about 1/3 of the water every week with dechlorinated tap water and used a turkey baster to remove wastes in between. We fed them algae and duck weed from the pond, but a friend uses spinach. Make sure to let them go as soon as they have functional front limbs, as they need better living accomodations than you can provide in the habitat *or* a glass cookie jar.
HTH
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