Frog Magic

I wrote in May about how the dumpster in our driveway came to be inhabited by a frog.  Sometime after that -- it must have been in June -- I got a message from Tom that there were tadpoles in the dumpster.  Now in retrospect this shouldn't have been particularly surprising.  The frog calls that we hear loudly every night are (I believe - if someone knows more about frogs than I do, please correct me) an announcement that this particular male frog has a fabulous place, and all the lady frogs should come around and visit.

Over the last month or so, we've been in the tadpole relocation business.  I've made two trips to An Undisclosed Location to relocate tadpoles; there were about a hundred the first time and about 50 the second time.  We've offered them to neighborhood children, and several families have taken us up on the offer.  Steve put some in his lily pond and took some to a friend who lives in Dekalb County. And for the last several weeks we've had about thirty of them in a plastic tank in our kitchen.  The picture below was taken in late June; in the upper right, they are eating bloodworms that were just added to the tank.

By early July, we had our first frog.  In this picture, he (or maybe she) still had part of his/her tail but was terrestrial and had been relocated to the terrarium where previously the lizard had briefly resided.

A few weeks ago we found the U.S. Geological Survey's Frog Quiz on line, which had links to audio recordings of the calls of different species of frogs.  We started through the list of native frogs in Georgia until we found one that sounded like our frog; when we got to Cope's Gray Treefrog, we all agreed -- that was it.  That was our frog.  There's a nice write-up on Cope's Gray Treefrog from the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory; according to them, they are a common treefrog in our area.  They are most common in mature deciduous forests where they spend most of their time high up in trees, but come down during breeding season where they breed in fishless wetlands.  Or dumpsters, too, apparently.

The most interesting and incredibly weird thing about Cope's Gray Treefrog is that there is a species which is nearly indistinguishable from it. morphologically, the Gray Treefrog, with an overlapping range.  The Gray Treefrog is genetically a tetraploid version of Cope's Gray Treefrog, which has the normal (diploid) frog number of chromosomes; the Gray Treefrog has twice as many chromosomes as Cope's Gray Treefrog.  

Yesterday some of the tadpoles died -- we had a problem with the water in their tank, that took a little while to get resolved -- but we've got 11 or 12 tiny frogs now in our terrarium.  We will be returning some of them to the outdoors this afternoon.  In the meantime, there are still a few tadpoles in the dumpster, although they are getting legs now and we've seen a few tiny frogs near the edge of the water.  Hopefully they will all be on their way to somewhere safer soon.