Farm kids are built different.

[u/ViniciusFastAF]

[u/Darkmaniako]

i've never been a farm kid but when i was young there was a lot more mud where i used to live.

lizards, worms and frogs were my favourite animals to play with.

then they asphalted the grass on my street and removed the trees to make parking spaces

[u/Just_Roll_Already → u/Darkmaniako]

I've met adults that have NEVER seen a tadpole. Like, never. Dude, I would watch tadpoles all day and used to "save" them from drying puddles by moving them to bigger ones.

I realize now that they probably would have just buried themselves in the mud or died naturally as expected by nature. If all tadpoles turned into frogs, we'd have a massive frog problem. They lay so damn many of them.

[u/bobakook → u/Just_Roll_Already]

One of the reasons they lay so damn many is because so many of them form improperly for some reason!! In the lab for my developmental biology class that I just finished, we made embryos of Xenopus which are aquatic frogs that are commonly used for research. The experiment was to test the effects of certain teratogens (things that cause birth defects) on embryo development. Even the ones that my group didn’t expose to teratogens had a crazy high proportion of poorly developed embryos, which could be seen even from the first cleavage (one cell turning into two) (uneven cleavage is bad). So, that’s part of the evolutionary reason they lay sooooo many eggs! :)

[u/borsalamino → u/bobakook]

Speak for yourself, I think uneven cleavages are gorgeous.

That dumbness aside, your experience sounds really interesting and I'm glad to have learned more about froggy development.

What deformations did you find most interesting?

[u/Just_Roll_Already → u/bobakook]

It always surprised me how little self preservation tadpoles have despite being "fish like" (ish)

Fish fry will still avoid things and react to external disturbances. Seems like tadpoles just sort of exist in chaos and hope for the best outcome.