The life cycle of frogs is fascinating.
It all begins as a little black speck in the centre of an individual egg in a ball of jelly frogspawn. The spawn quickly expands and swells with water as the tiny tadpoles develop and stretch into little black blobs. When they wriggle free from the jelly they can breathe underwater using their gills. At these early stages they feed on old jelly and algae in the pond and use their rough rasping 'teeth' to scrape off the algae.
As their legs develop they also change to become carnivores and eat tiny insect and other pond life.
Only a small fraction of the tadpoles will survive to become adult frogs, that's one of the reasons that frogs lay so much frogspawn in the first place.
Toads also lay spawn but unlike the clumps or balls of frogspawn, toadspawn is laid in long strings.
photograph copyright Paul Morton
This is a freshly laid clump of frogspawn, about the size of a tennis ball.
It will swell and expand over a day or two to become about 4 or 5 times bigger and joins with the other clumps of spawn to become one large mass of frogspawn.
photograph copyright Paul Morton
And you can colour in the poster as you learn about frogs!
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