Tadpoles !

ljonski

My next door neighbour is a vegy and is desperately trying to stop them eating each other ! He's never had so many and says he needs to build some kind of ledge,so when they are older they can jump on.

https://www.youtube.com/48nh

dogstarheaven

i'm afraid your neighbour will have to get used to it as tadpoles naturally do this. the spawn would have hundreds and hundreds of eggs and this is nature's way of ensuring some of the eggs survive. apparently 1 or 2% (don't quote me!) only make it to adulthood.... your neighbour can always put down some watercress, lettuce leaves into the pond to give them some extra feed. in my pond, mine were taken from a community garden as last yr's frogs didn't come back (prob due to them not surviving the winter cold), so i've only a few of them. they haven't got their legs yet, but i'm hoping still!

Primrose

Most small ponds have far too many tadpoles for them all to survive and many of them will sadly starve to death. I always feed mine on a daily basis with boiled lettuce. (the leaves of the old fashioned round headed lettuces are best, boiled for about 5 minutes to make them soft enough for the tadpoles to suck).

When they start developing legs he will need to prop something into his pond to enable them to climb out and migrate, otherwise they eventually drown from exhaustion. They need to be out on land eating tiny insects to survive. They don't live in water most of the year.

Once they migrate, tell your neighbour to look VERY CAREFULLY before he starts mowing his lawn as there could be many of them hidden in the grass and they could be chopped up in the blades of his lawnmower. The first time I had tadpoles in a new pond and they migrated, this never occurred to me and I was devastated the first time I found I had chopped up a baby frog with the lawnmower. Now, from the end of June onwards I do a manual sweep of the lawn first to remove any babies and mow very slowly, moving any I find into the flower and vegetable borders.

ukjoel

Darwinism at its finest. Think its about 0.1% of tadpoles make it through to adulthood. If you think they lay thousands and if more than two made it through to breeding age and bred we would be overrun. And they breed yearly.

billy_1

i save many tadpoles from my pond or they would all be eaten by the fish, i put them in a large water butt and for many years have watched them develop then hop off. But this year they havent as yet developed any legs !! usually they have nearly all gone by now, anyone else experiencing the same ??:money:

Izzy.

Mine have no legs yet but they get bigger and fatter by the day.