Tadpoles

This summer my daughter raised tadpoles. She found them drying up in an empty lot next to a grocery store and decided to rescue them. The delight of this act could not be planned. The outcome was random and uncontrolled by adults. Either she would successfully raise the tadpoles into frogs, or they’d die. In the process of trying to guess what kinds of frogs we had on our front porch in an old fish tank, we found out that Western Kentucky University has an excellent website that lists the frogs of KY, their photos and recordings of their calls. We turned out to be mostly raising tree frogs. She learned about metamorphosis, about what they eat and when. She learned to keep the water clean and clear of chemicals. She learned to keep the water aerated. She watched them grow, develop buds that formed into legs and she watched their colors change from murky black to green. Then it was time to let them go. They did not all survive. We lost several to raccoons who also delighted in digging in the gravel of the fish tank and playing with the plastic plants we had placed there. A few more were lost to a mysterious die off toward the end of the process. We still guess that we raised a couple hundred frogs from tiny tadpoles. It was a very exciting, albeit smelly experience.