Frog Blog 3

Last time’s Mystery Photo answer: It is a mosquito larva. In two months it will emerge from the pond  and a mosquito will come out and fly away. Or maybe a tadpole will eat it first?

The tadpoles are flourishing: many of them have come out now and are swimming around the bowl.  It makes them very hard to photograph! They like the edges of the bowl:

And close up they now look like this, with a proper body and a tail. They are about 1/4″ long,  and their body is about the size of a grain of rice.

They often lie still, resting, but if the water moves, they swim around:

I put one in little bowl on its own so you could see how it swims. When we swim, we kick our feet up and down, but a tadpole moves its tail very fast from side to side. You might have to watch this very short video more than once to see what it does.

Once I’d taken the video, I put him back with his friends in the big bowl.

Here is a new mystery creature for you, from the pond. It looks like a collection of bits of reed, but in fact it has been collected by the larva of an insect, to protect itself from predators. From the safety of its armor, this one is venturing halfway out to investigate its surroundings:

Do you know what the insect is?? Answer next time!

My next post won’t be till the tadpoles have either grown much bigger, or are changing in interesting ways.  Up till now they haven’t eaten anything, but soon they will be hungry, and I will tell you some time what they like to eat. I’m not sure how long it will take for them to grow, but meanwhile I will go on doing posts for grownups about other things entirely, but all about nature, and maybe you would like some of the photos in those too?