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The Life Cycle of Frog

The life cycle of a frog starts when mom and dad frog fall in love and decide to havebaby frogs. Okay, nobody really knows if frogs fall in love, but its okay to think that they do.

Mom and dad frog will mate, either in the water or in a tree, depending on what kind of frogs

they are. You know this is happening when you see dad frog hugging mom frog from behind her.

The dad frog will lay on top of mom frog and wrap his front legs around her body and he will

hug her for several days. This hug is called amplexus.

Spawning

While mom and dad frog are hugging, mom frog will lay a bunch of eggs for the dad frog

to fertilize. Unlike human eggs, frog eggs are fertilized by dad frog when they are outside of the

mom frogs body. This is called spawning and is the very beginning of the frog life cycle. After

the mom and dad frog have finished spawning, dad frog leaves, and sometimes the mom frog

does, too. Sometimes mom frog will stick around, though, and wait for the baby frogs to hatch sothat she can care for them, but this only happens with some breeds of frogs, not all of them.

Mom frog will lay a whole bunch of eggs because most of them wont hatch. Some of the

eggs will be eaten by other small animals and birds, and some of them wont become fertilized.

Other eggs might become dried up in the sun or get broken in the water. The eggs that survive

will hatch after about 7 to 9 days and begin the frog cycle and start the many life stages of a frog.

But they dont get to be frogs just yet; they have to go through the tadpoles life cycle first.

The Tadpole

When frog eggs hatch they dont come out as frogs right away, they have to start out astiny little fish-like creatures called tadpoles. In the beginning 7 days or so of tadpole

development, a tadpole will eat the egg yolk that is still left in its gut. The only parts to the baby

tadpole are the gills, the tail, and the mouth. After about 7 days of tadpole development, the

tadpole will begin to swim around on its own and eat algae from the top of the water.

Tadpole Development

About four weeks into the tadpoles life cycle it will begin to grow teeth and skin over the

gills and will begin to become social and swim in schools like fish. Then 6 to 9 weeks into the

tadpoles development it will begin to grow longer and develop a little bit of a head and some

legs. At the end of the 9 weeks, the tadpole will look more like a frog than a fish, but with a long

tail. The tadpole will also start to eat things like tiny insects.

In areas of the world that have cold winter months or that are in very high altitudes,

which also are sometimes very cold places, the tadpoles life cycle takes all winter long to

complete.

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From 9 to about 12 weeks, the frog metamorphosis starts to really take shape. The tadpole that

looks like an itty bitty frog but with a long tail (called a Froglet) will lose most of its tail, grow a

frog tongue, and start to really look like a baby frog. The whole frog life cycle model is

completed after about 16 weeks when the frog becomes an adult.

Diagram of Frog Life Cycle