Our Frog Eggs Are Hatching Into Tadpoles!

Two days ago, we brought home some frog eggs from our homeschool group co-op. When we looked into the container of pond water and frog eggs today, we could see some very tiny tadpoles swimming around! The larger ones are about four millimeters long.

Here's one, but this is greatly enlarged:



When I took a photo of the tadpoles and enlarged it on my computer, I could see many more tiny creatures swimming around in the water. These "bugs" just look like little black flecks to the naked eye, but resemble very tiny tadpoles when the image is enlarged. I wish I could tell you exactly what they are, but I'm not sure. They may be the very tiniest of mosquito larva. Mosquito larva tend to swim on the surface of the water, diving down into the water to escape danger, and then kind of wiggling back up in a jerky type manner. The mosquito larva I have seen before have long skinny bodies and were larger than these "bugs." Yet there are 4 different stages of mosquito larva. If you'd like to know more about mosquito larva, here is a good site about mosquitos.

You can see some of these very tiny creatures in this image below, which by the way is blown up exactly the same amount as the image above. (They are actually the same photo, just cropped in different places.)



I'll keep you updated with more photos as the tadpoles continue to grow and change into frogs! (Here's my next blog on our tadpoles! Our Tadpoles Are Really Growing!)

P.S. Watching the frog life cycle is part of the Real Science 4 Kids curriculum we are using this year.