Froggy Bottoms

This afternoon there were five of us new froglets just sitting on the rocks at the edge of the Trug Pond watching the world go by. The last three months have been a whirl of activity in the never-ending hunt for food. But today, with the sun shining and our appetites gone, we just sat back, half in, half out of the water and took a leisurely look at the garden around us.



The Trug Pond is surrounded by dense undergrowth - an ivy, lavender, poppies, a couple of campanulas, a veronica and various ice plants. The ivy is a particularly good place to find insects; as I write I can see a couple of froglet bottoms sticking out between the ivy leaves some 20cm up from the ground. It's a great place to climb through looking for small insects.

If you sat with us on the rocks for just 15 minutes watching the periphery of the pond you would be amazed by the amount and variety of activity going on. Iridescent beetles busily scouting around, hover flies busy around the flowers, a slim elegant white slug examining a fallen leaf. We've seen tiny spiders and millipedes, and of course we are visited by the odd snail. There are plenty of ants and small flies too - they look interesting...

But there are some pretty scary spiders out there, some bigger than we are and a real danger to us at the moment. I'm looking forward to when I'll be a real danger to them!

Cuthbert returns for a Visit

We had an unexpected visitor to the trug pond today - Cuthbert, one of our earliest graduates, came back to visit. As you can see, he is now about 1.5 cm long and a fine figure of a frog. We first saw him jumping across the rockery towards the pond and was stunned by the way he dwarfed the newer froglets, many not even half his size.



Cuthbert stayed for an hour or so and regaled the youngsters with exciting stories from the undergrowth around the trug pond - of fighting vicious slugs, ambushing spiders and nearly being stepped on while crossing the lawn. It certainly sounds jolly thrilling out there. Before going Cuthbert gave a death-defying demonstration of how to climb the ivy in the pursuit of food.

Not all water is the same...

One of the problems living in a pond as small as ours is maintaining the water quality. We only have 27 litres of water and because it is a new pond there is little in the way of bacteria in the silt at the bottom to process our waste. You see there is a lot of us growing fast and as a result we produce a lot of ammonia and other waste which is very poisonous. In a normal pond bacteria in the mud and on plant surfaces convert the ammonia we produce into nitrites and then nitrates which are a lot safer. (Though even they will become poisonous if they become too concentrated). This is know as the Nitrogen Cycle.

In our new pond the bacteria haven't had a chance to build up yet, but luckily 20% of the water gets replaced with fresh pond water each day and that has stopped the ammonia causing us problems - until this weekend.

For some reason our regular water change stopped for a few days and the ammonia started to build up. Without enough friendly bacteria to clean the water the future looked bleak and indeed a couple of froglets died on the third day. Such was the rapidity of the change in water quality.

We were still reeling from the loss of our friends when we discovered that Archie, a young froglet who still had a long tail, had set out on a rather over enthusiastic expedition from the pond and not made it back.

On Monday we were saved by a massive water change, all the water in the trug being replaced with water from a nearby pond. This was lovely stuff, not a hint of chlorine (which is fatal to us), no measurable ammonia, or nitrites and 10 mg/l of nitrates which our more scientifically literate tadpoles say is just fine. It certainly feels a lot better!

Family Reunited

The last few days have seen big changes in this pond of ours. More plants have appeared giving better cover and there are some interesting new piles of stones, ideal for hiding between while waiting for prey. The grill over the water surface helps protect us from becoming prey ourselves, but some enterprising froglets have found it makes a great climbing frame too.



The plant pots on the left and right sit on slate and brick frog houses, apparently provided by a friendly deity to give interesting places to hide. But everyone who have explored the area say that there are some great places to hide in the plants.

But the biggest news has been the arrival of the rest of the family. In total another 258 tadpoles have joined us from the old box where we first hatched, making nearly four hundred of us in all. Even better, twenty five new froglets turned up, to join the thirteen still building up the courage to leave the trug. I was amazed just how small some of them were. The biggest trug froglets have bodies over a centimetre long; these newcomers seemed tiny in comparison. Still, it was great to see our old friends again.



The other really great news is that I gained front legs overnight. My sides had been itching for days and recently I found that my back legs were becoming pretty useful for struggling onto the edge of the lily leaf floating in the trug. They are getting noticeably stronger as I use them more. But now I have front legs too, and its true - your appetite really does disappear once your legs appear! I've spent much of today just sitting on a stone at the surface, building up the courage to start exploring further afield.

Exploration...

It has been glorious weather for froglets today. Although dry overnight, a friendly deity hosed the garden down early in the morning making perfect conditions for hunting ants amongst the vegetation.

Most of the day there were between five and seven froglets either on the edge of the pond or in the rocks around it. They made short forays into the plants, hungry after a few days of fasting while their lungs developed.



Unfortunately all this excitement and talk about exploring the garden was all a bit much for Boris, who in a fit of enthusiasm managed to throw himself over the pond edge and into the rockery. Unfortunately Boris, though a sizeable chap, is still a tadpole and doesn't have any legs yet. It could have been disastrous for Boris, but luckily a local deity was on hand to scoop him up, with a tea spoon of all things, and return him to the trug.