Tadpole tales

I know you have all been waiting with bated breath to hear how the tadpoles are faring in their oatmeal container habitat. As you may have heard, there has been a rash of captive tadpole death being reported across the blogoshere. Here is our sad tale.

We brought eight tadpoles into our home on March 12. Here is one getting used to his new home:


They started growing legs around March 25th:

See the little back legs?

I changed their water every week, collecting pond water from the same location where we caught the tadpoles.

We lost a few here and there, and then had a major die-off just as they were growing their front legs. We said we would let them go when they were little frogs, and I kept reminding myself we need to let them go, need to let them go. But, you know, things get busy.

Here is one of the last two survivors on April 20.


His buddy had absorbed most of his tail by that morning. This one was dead on the bottom of the container when I woke up the next day, and last surviving tadpole/frog ("frogpole"I think is the accepted term) was barely kicking. So we made sure to "release" the little guy in the pond on the way to run our errands. He was dead by then, but Milan took great pride in doing the release.

This is all very sad, but Milan didn't seem too upset by the dwindling numbers of tadpoles. Then, this past Friday we went for a walk along the pond and found this squirming mass of frogpoles in the exact spot where we had collected our fated friends.

Hundreds and hundreds of the little guys

So, we may have killed eight of them in our excitement to watch their transformation, but I don't think we did any long-term damage to the frog population.

As a side note, we found this awesome beetle today on the school grounds.

"Carabus lafossei tungchengensis" is the scientific name, in case you were wondering. Shown with a 1 yaun coin and a U.S. quarter for scale.

Although I was very tempted to bring him home to live in our empty cricket cage, we let him go after his photo shoot so he can live a happy life in the azalia bushes in front of our apartment.