What Do Tadpoles Eat?

Come March there is frantic activity in every ditch.  It's spring fever getting to the frogs and toads, all clambering on each other's backs and getting on with what life is all about.  A week later the ditches and puddles are full of spawn, and every child is busy with jam jars, filling every goldfish bowl.  By April, there are millions of tadpoles;  toad tadpoles, newt tadpoles, frog tadpoles, and over the weeks they grow, and grow.  What makes them grow? Frogs and toads are valuable creatures, eating flies and mosquitoes and midges.  But, what do tadpoles eat? 

Their growth rate is phenomenal.  They start off as an amorphous blob inside the spawn and feed on it.  Breakfast, lunch and dinner from the spawn.  Next stage is a little wriggly black thing and after a few days, they are recognisably swimming creatures with a  large head and a long tapered body.  And every child  is asking, "What do tadpoles eat?" 

"Put in some pond weed", says dad.  So handfuls of pondweed are carried in, dripping mud all over the carpet, and the tadpoles swim round and round and through it, but they don't eat it.  "What do tadpoles eat?"

"Try them on fishfood", says granny.  But the fishfood floats on the surface and the tadpoles ignore it and still they grow until each tadpole has two little legs.  They no longer look like little fish and fishfood is off the menu.  Again comes the plaintive cry, "What do tadpoles eat?" 

"Try them on breadcrumbs" says Ma.  But the breadcrumbs sink to the bottom of the goldfish bowl and the tadpoles continue to swim round and round, still growing.  They must be eating something!  Two days later, they have four legs - they can't survive without food and the cry now becomes despairing, "What do tadpoles eat?"

"Give them worms," says big brother.  So out the tadpoler trudges to the garden and digs and digs and comes back with a handful of horrid, wriggly, pink worms.  Drop them in - horror of horrors - they wriggle and twist and jerk and then float to the bottom and turn white and disgusting - and - the tadpoles ignore them. They are undergoing another change.  Their tails are getting stubbier and disappearing.  What do tadpoles eat? - not each other's tails, surely. 

The water gets murkier and murkier, the sides of the bowl are green with filth, - and as for the sludge in the bottom, composed of bloated worms, rotting fishfood and breadcrumbs - well!  A shiny, clean bowl is prepared and the tadpoles are moved into lovely fresh tap-water.  End of story.  Why are all these tadpoles, on the point of metamorphosis into real grown up puddocks, lying dead and still on the bottom?  What do tadpoles eat?

You threw it out with the bowl water, dear.  All the lovely green algae.

Meanwhile, back in the ditch, there are lots and lots of tiny frogs scrambling out of the water.  But not millions.  What happened to the millions of tadpoles?.  Ah well, that's really what life is all about.  Turn your question around - "What eats tadpoles?"

Eels and herons and ducks and drakes and geese and ganders and fish and dragon-fly nymphs and water-beetles and water boatmen ........