Natural scientists

As those of you who know her are aware, Mustang is intensely curious about the natural world and the creatures that inhabit it. Button follows her lead. Walks through the local little forest, and trips to the pond, are daily favourites come springtime. There, we observe the birds, catch butterflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers, and frogs (and even a praying mantis, two summers ago), chase squirrels, catch glimpses of rabbits and fox, see the ducklings swimming with their mothers and daddies, and generally have lots of fun.

Who would have thought you could do all this in one small patch of urban forest?

Yesterday, when I arrived home from work, I was greeted by enthusiastic cries of “Mommy! Come look! You’ll never believe it!” So of course I had to go look RIGHT AWAY.

At a trip to the pond with Nanny, the kids had caught two frogs and two toads. Not just any old two toads, but a female and male toad locked in a mating clutch. Upon spotting the toads, Mustang had at first been confused, not recognizing that there were two of them but thinking it was rather odd-shaped. But upon distinguishing the two separate creatures, she had immediately recognized it for a mating pair.

They had brought all these creatures back to our house and put them in an empty sand box-cum-swimming pool filled with pond and rain-water. (I have impressed upon them when collecting frogs’ eggs last and this year that they should not use tap water with these creatures, as the chlorine in the tap water could kill them.) Into the pool went a small tree-trunk cross-section and a plastic container for “islands,” and into the plastic container the children placed the mating toads – “because they’re land creatures.”

This morning, immediately after getting dressed, they had to go say hi! to the critters.

Lo and behold, a string of eggs was hy the female! Mustang promptly took and put it in the big container of frogs’ eggs sitting on our patio table (collected this past weekend - and some have already hatched!).

This has been an occasion of much learning already:

• that males can be smaller than females. At first they thought the toad on the bottom was the male, as it was bigger, but this morning Mustang asked me “Where do the eggs come from?” She was puzzled that they were hanging from the larger toad, the one on the bottom. So they learned that, while in the mammal world the male is usually bigger, in other species – likes these toads – the female is often larger.
• how fertilization occurs in amphibians. Mustang noticed that the toad on top was “squirting some white stuff” onto the eggs. I said the white stuff was the sperm (also known as spelt) and that this was how the eggs were fertilized.
• the proper environment for toad eggs. Since toads are “land creatures” Button wondered whether it was okay to put the toad eggs into the bucket of water with the frogs’ eggs (at least we presume they are frogs’ eggs!). I said that toads, like frogs, are amphibians, meaning they hatch and grow first in water, then move onto land. Frogs generally live in or near water even when grown, but toads tend to leave the water environment permanently once they reach adulthood.

Last spring we took a bunch of tadpoles from the pond in late May but didn’t have the opportunity to observe them grow and develop as we were gone for almost two months on holidays starting in mid-June. This year we will be taking only short holidays, mostly long weekends, so I hope that we will have the opportunity to see the eggs hatch into tadpoles and the tadpoles develop into frogs.



I have told the kids that we will keep some of the toad’s eggs but should return some of them to the pond, to ensure that at least some of the toads have a chance to hatch and grow there, in case ours suffer any mishap or don’t grow properly for any reason. We will also return the frogs and toads themselves, either today or tomorrow. They are accepting of this. (It helps, I think, that we have already had a wild creature or two die in our “care” from over-handling…)