Metamorphosis 3

10th October – full tail

11th October – tail shrinking

13th October – tail almost gone

At the risk of tadpole overload, we will finish the Metamorphosis series of posts with some pictures of our last home-raised frog. What amazed us about this one was the speed of change in the last few stages of development, particularly the shrinking of the tail, as you can see from the dates on the photos.
 
 
 
 

This tadpole/frog turned out to be a brown tree frog, but without  hearing its call, we can’t be sure whether it is a Southern Brown Tree Frog (Litoria ewingii), or a Plains Brown Tree Frog (Litoria paraewingi), as it seems we are on the overlap of distribution of the two species. In the past we have heard the calls of both of them here. Either way, we returned it to our ephemeral wetland, where we hope it will be able to avoid the interest of the White-necked Heron currently residing there.

The other tiny frogs we previously managed to raise from tadpoles appeared to be Common Froglet (Crinia signifera) and Plains Froglet (Crinia parinsignifera), which were also returned to the wetland.