Our Family Tadpoles & Frogs

Welcome to our family's journey discovery & raising frogs.

I hope you enjoy it.

Well, last year during the floods, which I have posted on my blog about months ago. We found loads of tadpoles at the back of my son's school yard.

Even while the rain pouring down on us, we all were out there catching them with a log fishing net & popped them into, what we could find at the time, being my son's lunch box.

Once we got home, we cleaned the water out & added fresh water for them & then popped them all into a small fish tank we had.

At first, we had no idea what we had, if they were frogs or toads. So we did a lot of research on the net to try & find out what we had.
With all our fingers crossed, we hoped for frogs & GUESS what! They were ALL froggies. WOOHOO.

So then, we had to work out what in the world we were going to feed these poor little things. We went back to where we got them & grabbed some of the leaf litter in the water that had grown algae & we placed it in the tank. They ate it but soon it was all gone (the algae) so we did more research to find out what else they eat & any bread was just as good. So we started to feed them some bread once a week.

Soon enough their back little legs appeared & it was so exciting to see them swimming around with some sort of frog like form. Then their front legs popped out "oh oh look mummy & daddy" my kids would call us to show us. We had placed the tank in their room so they could watch how they grew.
Wow now they had all 4 legs & started to look much more like frogs. They were so cute to watch & we spent ages staring at the tank & watching them all swimming around.

We then started thinking well what happens to their tail? Does it just fall off in the water?

So off we went back to the net to find out more & we found out that they don't fall off at all but in fact, once they start to come out of the water they will no longer eat the bread & need to still do their final growing internally to be able to eat bugs. In fact, their tails is what they use as sustenance as it shrinks & gets absorbed into their bodies & used as food & energy until such time that they are able to start eating bugs.

WOW we couldn't believe it! We had no idea about all of this.

Then we started thinking how are they going to get out of water & when do we know they are ready to do so?
We placed a few rocks around in the tank but we had to watch them as the silly things got trapped & we ended up losing a few of them.
Anyway, we noticed that they started to climb up onto the side glass of the tank & also up onto the rocks & made their way to the top half of the tank. OWWWWW it was so sweet to see them changing to this stage.

Day by day, their tails got shorter & within a few weeks their tails had gone. YAY, they look like frog now!
They just hadn't changed color much as yet. They had a slight brown to clear tan color to them still.

Once their tails had all gone & been totally absorbed into their bodies they started to look a lot more like the cute little frogs we know. as you can see below.

We had to start adding live plants & logs in the tank for them to go & hide in.

We got small pots & filled them up with some dirt & topped with a few small pebbles. We then added the plants that we found around our garden. We also had to add just the cut offs from plants such as leaves that were larger & couldn't grow in the tank. These leaves we have to change every for weeks depending when they die off & we just replace them with new & fresh leaves.

The one huge thing we started to notice though, was that we ended up with a few different types of frogs. Even though they were all the same size roughly to start off with as tadpoles, we soon noticed that some were growing much quicker & larger then some of the others.

So you can clearly see there are a few different types of Green Tree Frogs. We now have a total of about 8 different types of frogs all together!
I'll be taking more pictures in the coming days of the other types we also have & will do another update. PLUS will let you all know how my SECOND batch of tadpoles are going but so far they are already hopping out of the water hehehehe so cute!