Tadpole rescue society

& talking about climate change

Yesterday the kids had one of those great days where you hang out with a neighbor all day long. Our friend Miles came over early and we went looking for animals by the river. Before we even got to the river path we found a mud puddle. We always check mud puddles because there might be tadpoles in there—and, because we know how long it takes tadpoles to mature (generally several weeks), we almost always relocate the tadpoles, either to a temporary habitat on our deck or to a healthy stream.

These tadpoles obviously needed rescuing—the high temperature yesterday was ninety-six degrees, and the puddle was quickly drying up. It was lucky we had our “go bag,” a canvas tote we keep filled with a few useful items. Yesterday’s bag contained:

-two scoop nets with handles

-some petri dishes and a portable microscope

-a jelly jar with a lid

(Sometimes we’ll also have an animal track guide, a plant press, and a notebook. We always carry bottles of water.) The jar came in handy, but the tadpoles were too slippery to scoop with nets—what worked best was scooping with our hands (our friend Miles scooped with a mussel shell.)

“The water is so warm!” Harriet exclaimed.

“It’s too warm,” Bea said. In an especially shallow part of the puddle cut off from the main body of water, we saw that several tadpoles were floating belly-up. The heat had killed them.

We got as many tadpoles as we could, each of us scooping and placing them in the small jar. It’s had to leave tadpoles behind—the kids will stay crouched, scooping and scooping until they don’t see any more of the wriggling, comma-shaped bodies. But it was so hot we could feel our scalps burning. I convinced the kids we’d come back with a bigger jar, even though I knew the left-behind tadpoles might overheat and die.

“We should call ourselves the Tadpole Rescue Society,” Miles suggested.

We carried them home, then quickly transferred them to a Pyrex dish with cool (not ice cold) well water (remember, you can’t use city or treated water for tadpoles). The water was murky, so we strained and refilled it. Even though it was hot, the kids ate lunch on the deck so they could watch the tadpoles. A little later, while Miles and Bea played and Harriet rested, I went back to rescue some of the remaining tadpoles on my own, and the water was warmer still. I scooped as many as I could.

I’m sure it happens—water in a puddle is shallow, and ninety-six degrees isn’t unheard of around here. But I’ve actually never seen tadpoles dead in overheated water—dead because the water dried up, sure. But not because the water was just too hot to support their lives.

Later in the car, on the way to the pool, I asked the kids why they thought the tadpoles in the cut-off part of the puddle died, and the others lived.

“It was drying up,” Bea said.

“But it wasn’t all the way dry,” I said.

“It was too shallow,” Miles said. “Shallower than the other part of the puddle.”

“It was shallow, and that made the water heat up faster,” Bea added. “The sun could get to the bottom faster.”

This turned into a discussion of coral reef bleaching, which turned into a discussion of glacier melting, which turned into a discussion of climate change—Miles asked, what exactly causes it? Bea answered, and I filled in where needed. They agreed that electric cars were best. I pointed out that at that moment, our 8-year-old Prius was getting 56 miles per gallon. They thought that was pretty good. Eating less meat was also a good and easy plan.

We got to the pool, swam for a while, then it started to thunder. The pool closed and we went home again. In the car, Miles asked Harriet what she wanted to be when she grew up. She didn’t understand, so he rephrased the question: “What do you want to do when you grow up?”

Harriet considered, then answered that she’d like to make dinner.

Miles said he’d like to be a filmer. Oh cool, I said, a director? No, he said. A Youtuber. Then he added that he also liked sea animals like turtles, which earlier in the day we’d agreed would make good leaders (“slow and steady wins the race!” Miles said). You could be a marine biologist like me, Bea said. Or both, I said. You could be a marine biologist who makes Youtube videos about marine life. They agreed that this was possible—on a late July afternoon, almost anything seems possible.

Back home, we checked the tadpoles, sprinkled some romaine lettuce onto the water.

We need rain bad, our neighbor David texted. I request a rain dance.

I gave him the thumbs up, but we forgot. The promised storm seemed to pass us by, then late in the night it rained hard, cooling the air and drenching the gardens, the woods, the almost-dry puddles. We’ll check again for surviving tadpoles, but in the meantime our rescued tadpoles are eating lettuce and swimming happily in their glass dish.

If you want more information about how to rescue and raise tadpoles into frogs, check out this post from last spring.

We’ll be back next week, but in the meantime we have a question for you, Frog Troublers: what’s your favorite river or riverside animal?

P.S. Harriet got her first Covid-19 vaccine on Wednesday at our doctor’s office—hooray!

She wasn’t thrilled by the process but has been completely fine, and really likes her My Little Pony band-aid. As promised, it was fast, free, and safe. Still, only 1 in 5 parents of kids under five plan to get their kids vaccinated for Covid-19 right away. If you want to be equipped with information to share with friends, relatives, or neighbors, this post by Katelyn Jetelina (Your Local Epidemiologist) is really helpful, with a downloadable PDF of talking points.

Stay cool!