Monday 17 February 2020

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 of newly laid frogspawn in pond
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.

close up photograph of frogspawn in pond
photograph copyright Paul Morton

Free download poster of FROG LIFE CYCLE for Bug Belly book
And you can colour in the poster as you learn about frogs!

Bug Belly A4 b&W Life cycle of frogs poster





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Sunday 16 February 2020

A selection of fabulous drawings and wobblers sent in by Bug Belly fans from across the world. Please email photographs of YOUR creations to hot.frog@me.com to appear in this gallery.
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MAKING TREE FROGS
For this year's SAVE THE FROGS day I designed some cut out and make little tree frog models. Make and collect the full set here.
And here's one beautiful little Blue Poison Dart frog made by Nina in Switzerland.
Really excellent colouring and cutting out Nina, well done




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Photo of Nina from Switzerland with Bug Belly Wobbler