No Baby Frogs Spotted

Despite a large amount of frogspawn being laid in our office pond, we have to report that to date, no baby frogs have been seen.  The first frogspawn was laid on March 11th and over the following days a number of frogs spawned in our office pond.  However, despite team members keeping a close eye on proceedings during their work breaks we have yet to see any baby frogs (we refer to them as froglets) emerging from the pond.

No Sign of Baby Frogs

It is normal for us to lose sight of the tadpoles.  A few weeks after hatching the tadpoles gradually become more difficult to spot and for many weeks we don’t see any sign of them.  Our records show that the first baby frogs are seen around the second week of July, this year’s spawn was laid a week earlier than usual but despite the pond looking quite healthy we have not seen a single baby frog this year.  There are a lot of predators in the pond, various beetle larvae and of course the ubiquitous damsel fly larvae and possibly one or two dragonflies in their nymph stages but we thought that with the huge numbers of tadpoles in the pond some sign of the metamorphosis having taken place would have been noted.

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Of course, the large numbers of tadpoles could have been their undoing.  Perhaps there has been a lot of disease and as a result the tadpole population has been decimated.  We intend to clean out the pond in the autumn, before frogs start to hibernate, perhaps we will find a few froglets when we tidy up the pond and the surrounding area.

To read more about when the baby frogs are seen around our office pond: 2011 – Baby Frogs Start Their Exodus.