By Jean Ponzi
Tadpoles
Our friend Linden brought over 37 tadpoles in a clear box, rescued from a pool cover. “Raising them,” she said, “will be interesting.”
I met ‘em with trepidation. A lotta little lives to care for!
Plus, in 30-odd years growing our place as an urban forest, NO amphibians have EVER taken up residence.Low spots hold water for a day or two, but we’ve never been wet enough to hear Spring Peepers or Tree Frogs or Toads. I wish some lived here.
I’m not much of a tender, even with plants. Interesting, indeed. I feared these visitors would croak.
YouTube is hopping with tadpole-raising interest! Adults and kids share dozens of posts, about finding them in a natural pond (with appropriate cautions: DON’T disturb these habitats, they are in decline!) to Linden-style interventions.
From DIY pond-crafting to indoor aquariums, frog-fancy guidance filled my screen. Along with actual helpful facts, like: Anuransare the orderamong amphibiansthat lack a tail in their adult stage and have long hind limbs suited to jumping and swimming.
Who were our tads? Frogs? Toads? Linden was right: I got interested.
Frogs lay eggs in a clump, clear beads with black dot centers, a floating translucent mass. Toad eggs are long gelatinous strands, sometimes wrapped around vegetation in slightly deeper water. But we didn’t see this stage; our tads arrived half inch-long, well past being distinctive eggs.
All tadpoles start out black. Developing frog tads turn a mottled brown. Ours stayed jet-black and huddled in “shoals” in their box corners. Toads!
Likely the American Toad, Anaxyrus americanus, “the most widely distributed North American Bufonid,” according to U of Georgia herpetologists.
They were a commitment. Tad into Toadlet takes 35-70 days! This long maturing interval helps some of a new generation dodge predators and distributes food supplies among developing kin. With gusto, our tads nibbled the spinach YouTube advised me to boil for them, along with mysteriously blackened oak leaves Linden provided.
One zipped through metamorphosis. I called him Norm. Norm sprouted all four legs in his second week here, back legs first with long, sinuous five-toe feet, then tiny, delicate forelegs; just four toes each on toad forefeet.
As Norm’s legs grew, his tail shrank – a marvelous locomotive switch run by his Thyroid hormones. “Resorbing” that whippy tail nourishes the aquatic tad as his nervous system rearranges to direct the power of amphibious movement.
Watching from outside the box moved me.
Anticipating Norm’s advance onto land, I placed a little C-shaped cross section of “log,” partly submerged, in the water. A bridge propped onto the box edge as a nursery egress. Amphibian architecture!
Norm would sit – acclimating to air, I’m sure – on The Log just above Tad Pool. Viewed through a magnifying glass, he was a perfect miniature Toad, no bigger than my ring-finger nail.
Then, as Toadlets do, he was gone.
I enjoyed Twilight Tadpole Times. It felt nice to just be with them, after refreshing their filtered water and spinach. The glass revealed fine veined membranes, like eels have, around their flagellating black-point tails, and their shiny developing eyes.
We considered making a pond – YouTube is awash in plans – but project timing wasn’t right.
So I drove them, clear box safely cradled, to the home of another Nature friend, Louise, whose backyard tinkles and flashes with a two-tiered solar-pumped native-planted pond. In one poignant pour, their prospects leaped.
An interesting, lovely time with a lotta little lives.
Green Jean Ponzi is a longtime local voice for Earth, through her work for the EarthWays Center of Missouri Botanical Garden and community radio features, now on our new internet station Community Radio STL. Dig her Earthworms Castings commentaries at www.CRSTL.FM.