Unusual Creatures - Earth's strangest animals, as presented by Michael Hearst in the form of music, videos, words, and other tomfoolery.

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Unusual Creatures - Earth's strangest animals, as presented by Michael Hearst in the form of music, videos, words, and other tomfoolery.

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Ask the frog staff: How many tadpoles actually survive into adulthood?

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Hi Mark. A frog friend and I were at the lily pond today and it was rife with tadpoles of various sizes and stages. Two questions: 1) It looked like the two ducks might be feeding on them ... do they? 2) How many tadpoles actually survive to frog adulthood? — Christine C. This particular topic has come up a lot recently, and one of our visitors beautifully photographed a heron eating a rather large bullfrog out of the lily pond in the Children's Garden . It was a graphic interaction, but demonstrates how vital amphibians are in food webs and one of the reasons we use to illustrate how important it is to keep amphibians around. Almost everything eats them, or their tadpoles, or their eggs ... or all three.  Many animals eat frogs exclusively (including some frog species!), and the herons at the Garden obviously love them. I have seen ducks eating tadpoles quite rapidly. In fact, my amphibian class last summer quantified how quickly different aquatic birds could ...
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Species Spotlights: Poison frogs and Glass frogs

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Epipedobates tricolor | Phantasmal poison frog (Morispunga morph) Male transporting tadpoles. Frogs are among the most diverse groups of vertebrates . They occur globally from the tropics to the sub-arctic regions, and in just about every conceivable habitat, one can find a frog species that has specialized to live there. Despite this diversity, it is generally easy to tell a frog from any other type of animal. Thanks, in part, to the absence of a tail like most other critters. Due to the range of unique requirements these habitats demand of frogs, each species has specialized behaviors and/or characters and some of these specializations are quite spectacular. Today, we are featuring two species which possess unique, prominent physical attributes. First, and one of the author's favorites is the Phantasmal poison frog | Epipidobates tricolor , which has been living, breeding, singing and hopping around the Fuqua Conservatory since 1995. Most poison frogs (family: dendr...
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What is a deterrent to snakes? I have some land at the back of me, full of snakes.

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From Carrie Gardner, On Quora  ---- Black Racer, Coluber constrictor   Really, there isn't any. Products like “Snake B Gone" are junk. Anything that says that the scent drives them away is also a rip-off. They don't care about any of that. Mothballs have been banned for outdoor use by the EPA and is toxic for people. Please don't use any poisons because it sinks into groundwater and into bodies of water and poisons every animal and plant they come into contact with. If your land is full of snakes, that means the area is full of rodents, which is what most snakes eat. And I would like to add that most prey species far outnumber the predators. So you probably have a much greater problem than just a lot of snakes and right now, they are your friends. Snakes only go where there is food so your best bet to lower the number of snakes in your yard is to get rid of the source of food. If there a lot of snakes in your yard then chances are there is a good size rodent population...
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