Frog Metamorphosis
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” ~ 2 Corinthians 5:17
Metamorphosis is nothing short of a miracle in God’s creation. It is one thing to read about it, but to actually experience a creature changing shape and function before your very eyes is breathtaking, and leaves you awestruck. In our Frogs and Toads unit we recommend that, if at all possible, you collect or purchase frog or toad tapoles to observe the metamorphosis process. Doing this not only gives you and your children priceless hands-on learning experience, but also it gives you a valuable faith teaching opportunity. For as the frog/toad changes into a completely new physical creation, we change into a new spiritual creation when we accept Christ as our Saviour. This lesson can provide for a beautiful discussion with your children in regards to comparing the ways the creature changes versus the ways we change. And again, always referencing how God put these beautiful lessons in His creation for us to learn from, and to know that it is Him who did this (Job 12:7-9, Romans 1:20).
This spring and summer our family has been blessed to have two opportunities to do just that. Earlier in the spring we caught and raised about 20 tiny toad tadpoles; and just recently set the little baby toads free. And now recently my son has caught three frog tadpoles. We are unsure yet what kind of frogs they are; we are guessing they are two Green Frogs and one Bullfrog. Raising the frog tadpoles has been even more beneficial than the toad tadpoles. They are SO much larger and you can really visually observe the changes. The really cool thing is that two of them are still in the tadpole stage (typically frogs take a lot longer than toads to change), but one of them we’ve been able to watch slowly grow into a baby frog!! When we first caught it, it already had back legs. And just a couple of days ago little front legs popped out overnight! Now it is slowly absorbing it’s tail. It is also coming up more and more on the rocks and breathing with it’s newly formed lungs! Here are a few photos from our experiences.
With Back Legs Only
With Front Legs, Developing Frog Body Form
Absorbing Tail
Other Two Frog Tadpoles
Frog Tadpole Habitat
I just had to throw this last photo in here of my 3 year old who is very much unsure of holding this very large Green Frog my son also recently caught.
"That's a big froggy Mama," says Gabby.
~Melissa
Congratulations to Robin, the winner of our giveaway from the CHEK Convention!! Thank you to all who stopped by our booth this weekend. It was so nice meeting you all! We look forward to hearing from all of our new (and old) friends about their experiences with the NaturExplorer units!
What a wonderful post and I agree that watching frogs and/or toads go through metamorphosis is an amazing experience. About 2 years ago, we bought eggs through the mail… well, they didn’t tell us when we ordered that you aren’t allowed to release these frogs. So, we had one of our frogs for a little over a year! It was a great experience, though. And, I’m now happy we have a tadpole from a local pond that we can release at any time!