Tag: Common Frog

This is my contribution to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Future.

The prompt got me thinking about some of the natural history subjects I have photographed over the years. Butterfly eggs that will hatch into caterpillars that in the future will pupate and emerge as a butterfly for example.

After coming up with quite a few different life cycles I remembered my photos of the various stages in the development of a Common Frog (Rana temporaria). Some of them were published in a school textbook to illustrate the life cycle.

 

Multiple clumps of Common Frog spawn forms a large mass in a garden pond in Cheshire, England.

 

After a while the eggs in the spawn hatch into tiny tadpoles a few millimetres long. Here, three tadpoles are clustered together on an egg.

 

Over the following weeks the tadpoles grow enormously, this individual is now around 30 millimetres long. It won’t be long before this tadpole starts to develop legs.

 

After a while the tadpoles develop legs, their tails shrink and they emerge from the water as tiny froglets.

 

An adult Common Frog at the side of the garden pond where I photographed the frog spawn and this story started.

 

I skipped a few photos in an attempt to keep the post short.