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Arms Popping Out

Yesterday, we noticed that the littlest tadpole had arms.  They are very small, but cute.  It's actually starting to hop under water rather than swim.

tadpole with arms and legs

This photo looks like it's upside down, but that's just the way the tadpole was floating.  The water is at the bottom of the picture and the air is above it.  At first we were concerned that it was trying to breath air and couldn't get out of the water.  But after watching for a while, we realized that's just how it liked to hang out.

We've lowered the water level so there are some rocks they can crawl out on, but so far, they are happy under water.  That should change in the next day or so.  Once a tadpole's arms appear, their lungs develop and they begin to breath air not water.

We're working on a new habitat so that we can move them to a space that's mostly dry land with a bit of pond in one end.

tadpole with legs

Here's one of the last pictures of a legs only tadpole pole.  They seem to be amazingly huge.  The tail is over 4 cm in length.  That's a good thing since the tadpoles will stop eating when their arms appear.  Tadpoles reabsorb their tail for nutrition once their arms appear.  Then it's time to switch from eating plants and algae to eating insects and worms.  Should be interesting.

This morning, we were watching on of the other two tadpoles.   My son thought it had large bulges where the arms would be.  When we looked back about 5 minutes latter, there were the arms!  We couldn't believe how quickly it happened.  The tadpole or froglet, hadn't even moved.

 

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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on June 8, 2007 8:06 AM.

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