"Galen Hekhuis" wrote in message
...
About a month ago I had a bulldozer and front end loader come in and scoop
out a big hole in the ground. Actually, the thing looked like it had been
a pond before, in that it was fairly deep and full of water. But someone
had turned it in to a junk pile, with a bunch of willows and weeds growing
around the outside and the inside filled with junk. Mostly the junk was
dead branches and brush, but there were things in there like an old chair
or two, an old bar-b-que grill, a metal desk, other well, uh, junk.
Anyway, all that is gone and now I have a pretty bare 40' in diameter 5'
deep mud puddle. I think the pond might be below the local water table
because as soon as I quit pumping the water out, it filled back up to
about
5' deep. The guy who cleaned out the pond told me to get some rye grass
seed because it would sprout real fast, covering up the bare places and
helping control any possible erosion. The store I went to was out of rye
grass seed but the salesclerk sold me some other seed he said would work
just as well. I must have screwed up and made the clerk think I wanted
seed that absolutely would *not* sprout, because that is exactly what I
got. But that's another story.
Some two weeks ago I was out fussing around the pond and noticed about 4
big clumps of frog eggs. I thought that was a little fast, but just
figured I didn't know hardly as much as I thought I did about frogs. Then
today I was out fussing again and saw what looked like a ping-pong ball
with a tail. I couldn't exactly place what it was, so I grabbed a stick
and poked at it. It blinked at me, then lazily swam away. There are
oodles of small tadpoles in the water, but this thing was far, far bigger
than any of them. It didn't have any legs or anything either. I couldn't
imagine anything surviving the bulldozer and front end loader and having
the water pumped out of the pond, but then again I can't imagine this
tadpole growing in just a month. So how fast do these things grow, or was
this most likely a (very lucky) survivor?
Galen Hekhuis NpD, JFR, GWA
We are the CroMagnon of the future
Hi Galen -
I don't know what kind of tadpoles you have,
but I recall reading that different tadpoles
grow at different rates, some very quickly,
maturing in a matter of weeks, others taking a
year or so.
You might check out web sites for your
state or country. Most show local
animal life, how to identify, and so on.
I tend to get in my in-ground pond small green
frogs that produce bunches of tadpoles that
convert in a matter of a month or so to tiny
froglets. A couple of years ago I had toads in
the same pond. But I can't recall how long
their tadpoles/toadpoles took to mature.
Gail
near San Antonio TX Zone 8 USA