Frog Egg Project: Day 4

Today we noticed that the eggs have little dents in them, and we think we know what the dents are.

Toby thinks that the shell is fading away so the baby frogs can come out.

Kim thinks that certain insects in the water are eating the eggs for food. So, he thinks the dents are bite marks.

Kei thinks that the dent is where the head and tail are developing.

We looked on Wikipedia and found this picture:

Ours look like the picture on the top right.

Kei was right. "What a noob," says Kim.

"That's the problem with big brothers," says Mommy.

We found two more insects in the bucket that were eating the eggs. Toby drew this picture:

Toby says it's not his best work.

Then, when he was finished, we fished them out of the bucket and 'set them free' in the pond. Good luck, hungry critters.

If anyone knows what these things are, let us know! They disguise themselves as knobby sticks.

Frog Egg Project: Day 3

Any changes?

It's day 3 of our frog egg project and so far there hasn't been any changes in the eggs.

It's a bit early yet so we're still hopeful. Other than the frog eggs, there have been many swamp bugs thriving inside our bucket, one of which we had to remove because we suspected it of eating the protective gel surrounding the frog eggs.

There are many things that will eat frog eggs, for example: ducks, fish and insects (here is a good link to information).

The insect we removed went into the fish pond because if we dumped it into the garden it would drown. Now it will be eaten by our fish, but at least it has a fighting chance.

More Soon

Frog Egg Project

Mommy was walking down by the swamp watching the spring peepers make lots of baby peepers. They were laying hundreds of eggs. So after school we went down to the swamp with our bucket and scooped up a few eggs with lots of swamp water to keep them healthy.

Spring Peeper Eggs in a bucket

We will keep the bucket in the sunroom and will change the water every day after school to keep it from getting stagnant.

A drawing of a spring peeper egg.

We decided to draw a picture of an egg. We used our schema (which is the stuff we already know in our heads) and then I drew what I saw. The black stuff is the inside of the egg, and the green stuff is the gel that protects the baby frog. Baby frogs are called tadpoles. When they get older they are called frogs.

Here's the link to the original site.

The picture above has more detail, but I think our outside is a little bit brighter.

We'll post another picture in a few days so you can see the changes in the eggs. One website we saw said that the tadpoles can hatch within a week which we think is pretty fast!