Spotted Salamander, #Ambystoma maculatum This beautiful lady was found in South Hadley, Massachusetts 20 years ago. She was extremely cooperative with me photographing her.

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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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Splendid Leaf Frogs

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Hiding in plain sight! It was a cold morning today for Valentine's Day , but we had a lot of excited guests crowded around the frog exhibits! The highlight of this week's Sunday frog feeding tour, for me, was the Splendid Leaf Frogs . They really have the life! Most of them don't even wake up for their food, which is conveniently fed to them on foreceps. Cruziohyla calcarifer , the Splendid leaf frog Unlike many frogs, these leaf frogs grasp food in their front hands and stuff it into their mouths. This can be quite dramatic, as it was today. One of the males was hanging upside-down from a leaf while rather ungracefully stuffing a cricket in its mouth. Moments later, that same frog was fast asleep—back on its leaf. I couldnt get a picture of that spectacle (I was busy with the foreceps) but here are some photos of these beautiful frogs—truly splendid. Hope to see you there next time—11 am every Saturday in the conservatory lobby!
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