Front Legs! We Have Froglets!

I am in awe! I left for a few hours Thursday afternoon and when I returned to feed the tadpoles I saw something strange. I fetched my macro lense and camera to get an up close and personal look. What I saw was amazing. There were these two whitish nodes on both sides of the upper body of this one tadpole. I began to take pictures and right before my eyes two front legs just popped right out.

That was the begining of the exodus from tadpole to froglet. Next thing I know in a span of 15 minutes, one tadpole right after another was exploding with front legs. They began climbing up the habitat walls and on to floating platforms of palmwood I had placed in both habitats for just this purpose. They were pushing each other further and further up toward the exit.

I sensed something was afoot last night when around 2am I had gone out to check on the tadpoles. Their habitats were surrounded by 25 or 30 Little Grass Frogs, an elfin treefrog that stays mostly in low growing shrubbery and grasses. They were chirping and singing. It was as if they were encouraging the babies and saying, "Come on! Get out of there! You can do it! It's time!

While lots of the tadpoles did become Little Grass Tree Froglets this afternoon and will probably be leaving the nest tomorrow night, there are two remaining species who are unfinished. There's one that is slightly larger and thicker. These have big fat hind legs but no front legs. I believe these will turn out to be a small toad species. The other is a very, very small tadpole which has yet to develop any legs. I think these will probably turn out to be either Southern or Northern peepers.

Stay tuned for more fantastic news on our steet puddle tadpoles and check out all the fantastic pictures of the froglets and toadlets. It really is quite a phenominal process. If you feel our identification of species is incorrect, please let us know by commenting. While the evolutionary process of the frog and toad is perfect, we are most certainly not, so our identifying could be all wrong.