My, My, What a Beauty!

I had to show you the mouth on these guys now. Check out the teeth! No wonder they can tear right into the lettuce. They have some serious chompers.

Most of the tadpoles are about an inch and half long now. Their appetites have grown hugely, and mamma's cooked lettuce still remains their favorite food!

Little Wide Eyes

I went back up to Josh's pond yesterday and decided to scoop up some small pond plants while there. I figured they'd be good for the tadpoles. As I started looking at the water I was surprised and delighted to find this and bout 8 others like him. He is very tiny, only about 1/3 of and inch tip to tail. Compared to the other tadpoles he is very small. His underside is very transparent and I can see his heart beating through his skin! As you can tell, his eyes are very wide spaced, actually on the sides of his head! He has a smaller mouth also. One of the cutest thing about him is his fat, stubby square body. I've got to do more research and find out exactly what kind of frogs we have.

A Stranger Among Us...

This is a hatchling salamander, from the egg pictured on Sunday's post. It's about 10 days old. These tadpoles are only about a half an inch long, and seem to develop faster than the frog tadpoles. They have 2 legs in front with 4 tiny fingers. Although these guys are smaller than the frog babies, they swim fast! Most of the time though they like to hide away motionless in crevices under the larger rocks. I haven't seen them eat the cooked lettuce like the wogs do...hope they are eating something. I better do some research on these little fellas.

Hey where is everyone?

Well, I guess I better get to hatching! This salamander tadpole is one of the last to leave the safety of his egg. As you can see the egg to the right is vacant. The baby salamanders move around in their jelly eggs quite a bit right before they hatch. The green color is from algae that has grown inside the egg.
Time to move out, find a new pad!

Floating with the big guys

When I brought the eggs from Josh's pond home all of the loosely floating eggs hatched the very next day. Tiny, about a quarter of an inch, with small frilled gills, I wasn't sure what I had. The frilled gills threw me off. I thought maybe salamanders or newts. So much for my expertise at identifying newly hatched amphibians. They are frog tadpoles. What kind I am not exactly sure, I'm still researching that.

Remember the clear jelly clump, with the green eggs? They didn't start to hatch until about a week later, and it was evident right away they weren't frogs. They have much narrower bodies and frilled gills that continue to stay frilled. I'm thinking a newt. Or salamander.