Something has gone wrong with the eggs. Something has gone wrong with the amphibian eggs I gathered from the bog in back of the house in April and placed in an aquarium on top of my piano. At first everything seemed to be going well. After a week or so the first salamander larvae hatched, small speckled tear drops with red external gills. After another week some of the frog’s eggs hatched into tiny polliwogs.
Most of the eggs never hatched, but this, I felt, was to be expected; most animals that lay large numbers of eggs experience high mortality before birth
After another week the salamander larvae were about an inch long and had developed three-toed forelegs just below the gills. The polliwogs I identified as wood frog tadpoles. They were about twice the size of the salamanders and were developing their hind legs first. I kept refreshing the aquarium with bog water and waited for the next transformation.
But then, unexpectedly, things began to go wrong. One of the salamanders, I noticed, had been born with a bent, deformed body. Another seemed to have a ballast problem; it kept bobbing up to the surface and struggling back down. But the main thing was that, after several weeks, all development stopped.
Salamander and frog larvae are designed to metamorphose completely in a matter of weeks, even in a few days if necessary, in temporary wetlands. I had also been observing the salamander larvae and frog tadpoles in the bog. They had all disappeared by the end of April, and were presumably now crawling and hopping about the leaf-littered forest floor. But my harvested amphibian larvae seemed to have entered a state of arrested development. Gradually the larvae began to die off without metamorphosing. By the middle of May, only eight of the twenty salamander larvae that hatched still survived. Of the three tadpoles that had hatched, only one survived. Curiously, I could never find any of the bodies; they just seemed to disappear.
What had gone wrong? What had caused this shutdown? Was the food supply in the bog water insufficient? Was the water too cold? Too warm? Too acidic? I even wondered if it might have been a bad idea to have placed them on the piano, whether the eggs had somehow been damaged by the musical substrate of bad adult playing.
In any case, as June arrived, I began to question my right to keep them any longer. Then, just as I was about to give up on them and return the remaining young to the bog, the last of the frog tadpoles metamorphosed overnight. I found it in the morning, a small frog less than an inch long, of a general sandy color, still lacking the adult’s markings. The frog had crawled up onto a small rock I had placed in the aquarium, but it never moved or paid any attention to anything around it. It simply remained sitting on the rock in the middle of the aquarium, motionless except for its regularly pumping throat. It stared out into space with bejeweled golden eyes, as though waiting for something beyond this room, beyond this house, some release or fulfillment I could not or would not give it.
The release came the next morning, a bright, warm, summer’s day in mid-June. I found the frog floating belly up in the aquarium, limbs limp and extended in the bog water. Its throat was still, and I could see clearly now the black mask of the wood frog beginning to darken into identity across the open, staring eyes.
