Remember Those Tadpoles?

Remember how we saved a bunch of tadpoles and took them home? Well, weeks and weeks later, we finally have at least one teeny weeny frog. Yesterday we also had one, which I picked up and put down a couple of times, only to learn that wittle bitty fwoggies do not like that. It died minutes later. This morning, yet another wee polliwog became a frog--apparently ingesting his tail overnight. I feel terrible about the one I man-handled and have decided it's definitely time to release all of them--I don't have the skills or equipment to care for these incy wincy amphibians any longer. 

TA-DAAPOOOLE!

Of the original flock cloud, only around eight remain*. All the rest went in one of two major die-offs. I don't know what happened the first time, which was about two weeks after we'd first installed the tadpoles in our home. Suddenly the water was a murky mess and half the critters were floating around looking grey and hollow. The second massive die-off was entirely my fault: I had run out of boiled lettuce and cheated by dropping in just a tiny bit of, um, bread. Fail.

Almost frogs (or toads?)

For anyone who cares to know, here are my major tips and tricks for the successful raising of tadpoles. Assuming you consider eight almost-frogs out of 30 tadpoles a "success": 

1. Change their water every few days. The new water should be de-chlorinated. I put tap water in a big glass jar in the sunshine for a few days, which seemed to work. Sometimes I also added a little fresh tap water, but I guess in Vienna the chlorine levels are so low it didn't hurt anybody. I reckon in many other cities tap water would basically be an amphibian death sentence. 

Also, not changing the water is very bad--I'm pretty sure that's what was behind mass extinction one. The water should not get even a little bit cloudy - not at ALL. You'd think that was fine, since tadpoles live in filthy puddles, but it is not. I'm sorry, duders. I drowned you in your own goop. 

How do you go about changing tadpole water? What you do not do is try to individually spoon the tadpoles out, because you have better things to do, like change your actual human tadpole and make lunch or whatever. What you do is take out all your decorative rocks, pour the whole mess of water and tadpoles through a fine sieve (poop<"fine"<tadpoles), and dump the tadpoles into a bowl of clean, de-chlorinated water. Tap tap tap your sieve! Those suckers can be sticky. Put your rocks and your tadpoles back in their aquarium, i.e. their big glass tupperware with no lid, which is what we used. Add water as necessary. 

How the Noodle looks to a tadpole.

2. Direct sunshine murders frogspawn. We put our container on a table next to a big plant whose (non-toxic) leaves sort of gave it some shade, and anyway it was not in direct sunlight. Also, somewhere on the internet it says that mint and some other herbs and plants are toxic for fwoggy woggies, so beware. I'd be more specific but I can't really remember and also there is Google. 

3. Boiled lettuce. Feed them lettuce boiled down into nothingness, which you then chop. You can freeze little chunks in an ice-cube tray (a whole ice-cube would be, like, five times too much for one feeding of 20 tadpoles, though) and drop them in every two or three days. Do not feed them bread. I'm sorry, little guys. I didn't know. 

4. Don't touch them. They die. I'M SO SORRY, little frog from yesterday. 

Have fun growing froglets! 

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*A flock? A pride? A murder? A group? According to the internet, the author of one book about clusters of animals says it's cloud, but scientists use school or shoal. Let's go with cloud.