Tadpoles Galore—Part 2

I discovered the nature of the pairing a few days later. Once again I looked in the barrel, wondering how the resident king was doing. He was gone, along with the other one! As I peered down into the water, I spotted many little black spots, swimming around. My first reaction was, “Oh no!, the mosquito larva population had exploded.” (That's another story. We'd been fighting the battle of mosquitoes who had been using the barrels for depositing their eggs; later finding jillions of larva swimming around, about to hatch and fill the air with their buzzing, biting selves.) But no, mosquito larvae don't look like that. Peering closer, I saw that I was looking instead at jillions of wee pollywogs!

Well, maybe hundreds of them—swimming happily around. They were cute. But it hit me that their happiness might be short lived, as I wasn't at all sure that a plastic barrel made a decent home for tadpoles. This was not a pond in the woods that their dad had held dominion over and from which they could thrive and grow to maturity, but an artificial pond made of plastic.

What were they going to eat? And what would happen when I turned the sump pump on at the bottom of the barrels and began watering the garden? Would I be spraying out chewed-up pollywogs on our veggies? Yeeks! Furthermore, the barrels sat in the sun during the day and the water could get very hot. Would it cook the tadpoles? If not, when I pumped fresh water from the well, would it be so cold as to shock them to death? Suddenly I had a dilemma. The health and well being of hundreds of pollywogs was thrust into in my reluctant hands—just because I had plunked down three plastic barrels, in order to keep my garden from going into drought shock. Life gets complicated.

My first order of business was to try to do something that would prevent my adopted tadpoles from slowly starving to death. What kind of food would they need? I had a lot to learn. I decided that a good beginning would be to transfer as many of them as I could to a nearby pond—which already had a bunch of frogs in it, so the appropriate food must be available there.

I got a sieve from the kitchen and began tadpole dipping. I've never chased pollywogs around a barrel, trying to coax them into a sieve. It wasn't easy, as they seemed not to understand that I was a friendly being. They tried their best to avoid my scoop. But I eventually trapped several dozen, put them into a bucket, carried them to the pond, and dumped them in.

But then I had the troubling thought that resident pond frogs (not tree frogs, but bullfrogs) or other pond critters just might consider wee tadpoles as a great food treat. Was I taking my baby charges out of the barrel frying pan and casting them into the pond fire? I hunkered down by the edge of the pond and watched for a few minutes, to see if frogs or other pollywog predators came rushing in to begin dining on their new, tasty neighbors. Of course, they played it cool while I was watching, so I left, still wondering about the success of my emigration attempt.

I did a little research that night and discovered that tree frog tadpoles feed on bacteria and algae. My thought was that there was probably plenty of that in the barrels, as various flying bugs periodically fell into the barrels and began decomposing. So I decided to leave my remaining pollywogs in the barrels for a while, and see how they fared. I thought that if they were OK, it would be neat to watch my wee charges transform into frogs.

But then another troubling question posed itself: What might happen to dozens of tiny tree frogs later in the summer, as they began to enter the fall stage of their lives—when they were programmed by evolution to burrow down into the mud and hibernate? Surely, the blue plastic barrels would not be much of a domicile where they would want to set up house for the winter. There's no mud that they could burrow down into, and go into stasis until the spring came. I knew that what water remained in the barrels froze solid; they were definitely not a good substitute home.

The best I could do, over the next few weeks was to keep scooping as many of the growing tadpoles as I could out of the barrels and give them a ride to the pond in the woods. In the end I am sure that a bunch of the little guys never made it to maturity, but it was likely that a greater proportion of them survived, than if they'd simply been abandoned by mom and pop in a pond. Fish and frogs lay a huge number of eggs, so that a tiny minority will survive and carry on the species. These polywogs' parents never realized that, by choosing the plastic blue barrels, they were leaving the survival of their offspring in the novice hands of a bipedal mammal.