Happy Earth Day and...

something is happening to our frog eggs.  After spending time away this weekend, I checked on the babies. This is what I found.

Instead of little spheres in the eggs, there are little comma shapes in them.

So what does this mean?

It means that the eggs hatches and the frog babies are now embryos. They are starting to look like something, but it could be anything!

Here is a close up and can see that they do look like embryos - there is a darker backbone and a head. They are going to be living off the yoke of the egg for a while. Frog eggs spend about three weeks as embryos so we should have tadpoles soon!

Guests

These are some of the guests we had at the library today. They helped us learn about metamorphosis. Metamorphosis means to change and these little guys change into tadpoles and then in to frogs.

I borrowed these frog eggs from a pond behind my house. Not the big pond but a much smaller pond nearby. Every spring, or least since I've live here, we've found frog eggs in the pond. This year there were about the same number of masses as usual, but each mass was smaller. In the past, there were hundreds of eggs per mass and now, as you can see, the number is much smaller. Yep, that is an entire mass in the picture ~ about 30-40 eggs.

I will hatch these babies and keep you informed. Before they get their back legs I will return them to their home pond and hopefully listen to their mating song next spring. 

Want to get your own eggs or tadpoles? Check out this blog post on some guidelines for keeping tadpoles.

Book Review: From Tadpole to Frog

From Tadpole to Frog by Wendy Pfeffer.

This is part of the Let's Read and Find Out Science series and Level 1 books are designed for preschool and kindergarten aged kids. They are great books in general and this is no exception. The vocabulary might be a bit tricky for most beginning readers, but we all need a little help from time to time with big science words.

This book has illustrations rather than photos. I do prefer photos for non-fiction but these pictures are well-done and accurate.

4/5 stars.