Our second adventure

After the tadpole turned into the frog, the first part of our adventure came to an end until we realised that finding the flies to feed our frog is now the beginning of our next adventure. The children tried everything to feed the frog but our frog was determined not to eat them. We placed the spiders with no results. Even though we bought the housefly maggots from the pet shop, we didn’t get any flies immediately as they take 3 to 21 days to hatch out depending on the stage of their development.


This long wait gave the opportunities to learn many aspects of  the frog ecosystem such as

• Frogs hibernate in winter because it’s hard to find food in winter.

• The food chain.

• They also learnt the life cycle of the house fly (maggots --- Larvae --- Fly) and also the favourable conditions for the hatching of the flies.

After the long wait, finally some flies hatched out and the children were very excited to see the frog’s skin change colour from dark green to bright light green and also to see the frog positioning himself to catch the flies.

Even though we were successful in providing a  favourable environment for tadpoles to turn into frogs during the winter, we found it hard to find the flies for a long time. To our surprise, the frog survived the hunger and we are happy to declare that now we have got plenty of live flies for our frog to munch on. (Yum yum)  We are also delighted to find our tadpoles with two back legs and they are all doing fine even though one of the tadpoles did not develop any eyes.

Hope these links will provide additional information about the NZ frogs:

http://www.nzfrogs.org/
http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/frogs/1
http://www.doc.govt.nz/conservation/native-animals/reptiles-and-frogs/frogs/
http://www.suzy.co.nz/suzysworld/Factpage.asp?FactSheet=270