Frog Egg Development : Boreal Chorus Frogs (time-lapse video)

 

Boreal Chorus Frog Egg Development and Hatching

This time-lapse video condenses 56 hours of frog egg development and tadpoles hatching into just under two minutes (1 minute 52 seconds). That's one frame photographed every minute resulting in 1800 times the real life speed. In addition to showing the boreal chorus frog embryos developing into tadpoles, you will see the algae growing and generating oxygen bubbles and some very small creatures moving around -- there is always more than you bargain for! You will also see that a number of the eggs don't change at all -- they are apparently infertile or otherwise not viable.  In my experimentation with this I found a number of eggs in every batch I looked at to not develop into tadpoles.  I am guessing that the external fertilization that frogs use -- males releasing sperm into the water as the female lays eggs -- may not be 100% effective resulting in some eggs that don't hatch, but that's just my theory on the matter.

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