Crime of missing tails probably solved.

Fish can be quite nasty to tadpoles, either eating them outright or nibbling away bit by bit. Since I have no fish the other suspect is dragonfly nymphs. They are plentiful in the pond and are voracious feeders of tadpoles.

Apparently if tadpoles have part of their tails eaten they can still morph successfully into an adult frog.

The image shows a dragonfly emerging from it's nymph casing.

What's happening to their tails?

Whilst clearing out plant overgrowths I noticed that a few of the tadpoles seemed to have shorter tails.

It almost looks as though they have had the last few millimetres bitten off. They don't swim with quite the same fluidity as those with standard tails.

I don't know if this is a normal variation of if something more sinister is at work.

Pool baskets and close shaves.

This frog and its' friend were lucky not to be squished when they decided to hide in the pool's filter basket.

The pool being somewhat green meant that my husband did not see them when he was inserting the basket back in. It was lucky one popped its' head up just as he was about to press the basket into place and undoubtably flatten the poor frogs before turning on the filter where ....

some thing just shouldn't be said.

Nearly one year old tadpoles.

While most the tadpoles last summer metamorphed into young frogs these tadpoles did not. Instead they lounged lazily at the bottom of the pond most of the winter. I didn't think they had survived but now with the warmer weather they are starting to become more active and at last are morphing.

I wonder if they have grown so fat by eating the other little tadpoles. I witnessed the tadpoles canibalising their same sized siblings last summer. I assume it's nature's way of controlling a population too large for the pond.


It was hard trying to measure them as I couldn't get the tape and tadpole out straight and operate a camera at the same time. I also imagine that they might have been a little longer if I had nabbed it before it had grown legs, but still you can see in the photo that it is 11.5 cm long with a bend in its tail.


If you look carefully in the next photo you can make a comparison between a three week tadpole of what I assume to be the same species (Litoria Moorei) and the one that is approximately 11 months old.

Stranded

Tadpoles love to sunbake. This one at only about a week old was sunbaking a little too long and managed to become stranded on top of a lilly pad.

In out warm climate water evaporates quickly and pond levels can drop several centimetres in a day.


Lucky it was rescued in time.

The long wait.

Over the second winter the frogs all seemed to disappear. The fish were gone but I kept tending the pond. I had heard that it may take years for a pond to start producing tadpoles, anyway dragonflies larvae were developing and taking care of the mosquitoes. I had also put my name down on a local tadpole program where people with excess tadpoles or unwanted taddies give them away to people nearby hoping that a suitable donor would appear.

Here's our frogless frog pond.

http://202.14.152.30/frogwatch/pages/tadpole_exchange.asp

This is the link if you are in Western Australia to go on the tadpole exchange program. I wonder if there are others like this around the world?

Then with the spring, nearly two years after bringing home the tadpoles I heard the marvelous sound of a motorbike frog. It was an exciting moment but the excitement turned to pity for the frog as it seemed to keep calling day and night for weeks and sounded so lonely. I had grave doubts that any other frog was around to hear it.

This link takes you to a recording of their call which sounds just like a dirt bike changing up gears. Well worth a listen.

http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/frogwatch/pages/frogs/sw/10.asp

In the meantime the neighbour who breeds Koi (a foreign enemy of frogs) had told me he had found a frog in his Koi pond that was being attacked by his fish. He had rescued it and thought he could help the frog by putting it down a storm drain so it would find a swamp somewhere.

I know he meant well, he just didn't know drains are not pathways to earthly heavens for frogs but lead to pipes that release into the ocean. I felt all was lost.

Then a few days later I could hear three motorbike frogs calling from his back yard. Why his backyard?? At least I knew there were frogs about.

Then on my Dad's birthday I was looking into the pond - pondering and there was something that looked like a tadpole. I thought it must have been a tiny twig and poked it. Sure enough it moved. There were hundreds of little tadpoles. What a wonderful, joyful sight. This photo is taken after two weeks of growth.

Algae, algae and more algae!

With warm weather and sun exposure (essential for tadpoles healthy development) algae is bound to bloom. The good part of this is that algae is a food for many tadpoles. The bad part is that algae can and did choke plants and during the night depleted water of oxygen and caused the tradgedy that killed off my fish. The idea is to get a balance.

I tried algae killer that claimed to be friendly to fauna and threw in some barley staw with no success. I introduced duck weed to try to cut out its source of light and energy but the algae simply grew faster and grew on the duckweed until it was so heavy the duck weed sunk like the Titanic.

The emergent water plant (a native species of Acanthaceae) also struggled with algae choking anything under the water but the algae couldn't touch the leaves that made it above the water level. This plant is known for its ability to soak up excess nutrients that can promote algal growth.

Water lillies also managed to grow above where algae couldn't swamp it.

To control strand algae I remove it by hand when I can see it in large lumps. Algae is a useful organic addition to your soil. Be warned however that little creatures hide in algae and it is worth giving it a check before disposal. I once had a large tadpole that had held over transforming into a frog over winter drop onto my lap when I was flinging algae into the garden and often find dragon fly nymphs and snails too.