Super exciting news! I was gone for four days. When I left, all tadpoles still looked like tadpoles: a grape-shaped body with a long tail, and I think they all already had hind legs but I didn’t see front legs on any of them. I gave them plenty of food hoping they would survive my absence. When I came back, one had fully turned into a frog! He was swimming around aimlessly, I am guessing desperate to find land. He is still very small, smaller actually than some of his water simp siblings. I called him “Little Man”. He has no tail, maybe just a small bud as a remnant from his aquatic beginnings.
I didn’t even take the time to take a photo of Little Man and rushed outside where I had been soaking my aquarium wood in a storage box to get rid of the tannins. I should really have refreshed the water before my trip as a few days into soaking it had already turned brown. Now, I didn’t have time for a second soak. I removed some of the water from the aquarium to make space for the wooden log. I then rinsed the log and placed it in the aquarium. Finally, I removed more water so that at least some of the log would stick out from the water surface.
Once I thought the emergency had been dealt with, I tried looking for Little Man and couldn’t see him anywhere. Worried I’d squashed him when lowering the log, I lifted the log and took a good look around. When again I couldn’t find him, I placed the log back and saw he was sitting on the protruding part of the log this whole time! He must’ve swum on within seconds of me introducing the log.
Little Man has been sitting on the log seemingly almost all the time since I introduced the log: I guess he was tired from swimming around with no place to rest. I feel a little bad about this for who knows how long he’s been struggling. I ordered a small ‘basking platform’ to give him some more turf.
Because I removed a lot of the water, most of the ‘egg patches’ were now no longer under water. I thought that this would probably mean the end of them so I pushed them down on the glass to be fully covered by water. This resulted in some of the eggs coming off in clumps but some are still stuck to the aquarium wall. It also looks like in my absence more eggs were laid. Here are some eggs stuck to decorative, fake coral:
The egg patch that was deposited lower on the aquarium, that I did not have to move, is looking good, and a smaller patch has appeared next to it (or I just didn’t notice it before). You can see that there’s some development in the eggs, and perhaps in some cases the baby snail has already left the egg?
Some snails appeared to be checking each other out, again, but maybe my presence disrupted their ‘dance’:
Spiral snail is still having a good time:
Tadpoles:
And some more photos of Little Man:
I read that frogs eat mosquito larvae, but where am I going to get those? I caught a moth and two flies that were buzzing around in my house and gave them to Little Man, although I think he’s too small to eat them at the moment. We will see!
