I climbed the broken down bird tower in the center of the wetland yesterday in search of tadpoles.  I haven’t had luck on my own, but Mahmood volunteered to assist me.  Another option may be to hormonally induce adult frogs to release their eggs/sperm in the lab.  However, that only solves the problem of obtaining tadpoles to manipulate, it doesn’t help in estimating natural densities, which is important to know if I want to argue an important role of tadpoles in decomposition.

The wetland is significantly deeper this year than it was last, at least for the middle of June.  What’s more, the vegetation is thicker – the Neptunia has even started to flower!

The tower, although flimsy, gave me a pretty good view of how solid the vegetative cover is – maybe 5% of the wetland is open and can be seined for tadpoles.  Of the points I’ve tried, I’ve seen zero tadpoles….

By the way, sorry for not taking a photo from the top of the tower – I trusted it with my life, but not my camera.