Frogs , Glug glug (Frogs)

Member Name: mumsymary

Product:	Frogs
Date:	18/03/05 (1691 review reads)
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Advantages: wonderful animals

Disadvantages: none

Common frog rana temporaria

There are other species of frog in other countries but I today am going to talk about our common British frog

I looked into my pond on Saturday evening and it is a heaving mass of fornicating frogs, a couple of weeks ago I noticed one or two male frogs swimming in my pond and slowly their numbers increased now the females have arrived and the frolicking and croaking has now begun. If I walk quietly I can watch their activities, as soon as I make a noise they disappear into the weeds and mud.

How do I know they are frogs? Well frogs have a smooth shiny yellowy green skin. They are about 8 cm long. Toads have a dry warty skin are a darker colour generally a bit greyer.
Although these frogs are called common in a lot of the country they are not so common due to the loss of some of their habitat and the use of insecticides on farms and in gardens. There is also a virus known as red leg that effects frogs and kills them.
Frogs hibernate in the mud at the bottom of ponds or in a muddy ditch over the winter and wake in the spring when the weather warms up.

Well after the male has locked the female in a loving embrace for several hours the female will lay up to about 200 eggs!! A frog is about 5 years old before they mate

The female will lay lots of eggs on the surface of the water.
This is called frog spawn and looks like tapioca a white transparent gloopy jelly substance with a black dot in the middle. The black dot is the frog embryo. The black dot will slowly develop if you look after a few days you will see its tail taking form and slowly it will grow into the tadpole,
How do I know if its frog or toad spawn? Well frogspawn is laid in big blobby clumps; toad spawn is laid in double rows in a string of gloopy spawn.

Development from spawn to tadpole takes about 2 weeks in good weather longer in cold. If the spawn is laid in early Feb and it is frosty often the embryo turns white and dies, when the embryo is fully developed it is called a tadpole and swims out of the jelly.
Tadpoles first meal is the jelly it contains lots of nutrients. A frog tadpole is a brown with gold specs a toad tad is black the tadpole goes on to eat green stuff usually alga first before attempting pondweeds.
I love to sit by my pond in a sunny spring day and watch the hundreds /thousands of tadpoles Sadly while they are little the newts in my pond thinks they are tasty. Sometimes the tadpoles eat each other It is Thursday now and there are about 6 blobs of spawn in my pond yes those frogs have been busy.

At first the tadpole is just body and tail swimming round the pond, eating alga. At
The tadpole will soon grow back and front legs at about 6, 7 weeks old about 11to 12 weeks tad will lose his gills and have lungs so he can breathe air tadpole will lose his tail and become a tiny frog (1-2 cm long) resting under stones and leaves at the edge of the pond, In about 3months time I shall be finding tiny frogs everywhere jumping about.It takes 11-12 weeks for a tadpole to change to a frog , this will depend on weather of course .
When all the spawn is laid most of the adult frogs will disappear into and undergrowth some wandering away to other places.
Frogs will return to the same pond they were born in to breed there next year A frog is an amphibian the tadpole has gills and takes is oxygen through the water he will die if out of water, At the end of tads development he develops lungs and can live either on land or in water he can breathe through his skin or use his lungs

I love my pond to encourage frogs we dug some of it about 3 ft deep and also have some shallow areas 5-10 cm deep. We made sure the sides were not deep straight edges. There is plenty of planting and rocks around the edge of the pond. In the pond there is also pondweed and a couple of round stones and a rotting log. The rocks weed and log provide shelter not only from the cold but also from the sun.

An advantage of having hundreds of frogs in the garden should mean few slugs and snails but somehow we still get a problem with these, we live on very chalks soil that suits snails, Please do not use slug pellets else the frog may eat a dead slug that has the pellet poison in its body and the frog will die. .
If I get too many tadpoles for the food my pond supplies naturally I might feed them a little goldfish food. Also I collect the slugs and snails from my veg patch and pop them in the pond and the tadpoles eat them


Fortunately I live in an area where we have quite a few frogs, but frog numbers have decreased in some areas of this country due to the use of herbicides and pesticides and the filling in of ditches streams and ponds. Now a lot of frogs live in peoples garden ponds rather than wilds ponds.
Do not collect spawn from wild ponds but if you know someone like us who has an abundance of frogs then yes you could take some with owners permission of course. If you have a pond most likely a frog or two will find it.

I shall leave you with a frog song I sing at school,


Five little freckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious flies
Yumm yumm
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there was only 4 green freckles frogs, Glug, Glug




Four little freckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious flies
Yumm yumm
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there was only 4 green freckles frogs, Glug, Glug



Three little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious flies
Yumm yumm
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there was only 4 green freckles frogs, Glug, Glug

Two little speckled frogs
Sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious flies
Yumm yumm
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there was only 4 green freckles frogs, Glug, Glug


One little speckled frog
Sat on a speckled log
Eating the most delicious flies
Yumm yumm
One jumped into the pool where it was nice and cool
Then there were no more freckled frogs.


Thank you for singing along with me croak croak

Summary: frogs