Common frog
As a common frog you would start life as one dot in a jelly clump of a couple of thousand eggs – and the odds that you reach adulthood would be small.
Two lives in one
The common frog, Rana temporaria, lives across most of Europe, from Spain and Britain to the Urals and northern Scandinavia, in meadows, woods, gardens and anywhere near ponds and wetlands. Adults are about 6–9 cm long, brown, olive or reddish, with a dark patch behind each eye. In early spring, often as soon as the ice melts, frogs gather in shallow ponds to breed. Males croak with a soft purring call and clasp females in an embrace called amplexus while she releases a clump of roughly 1,000–2,000 eggs, which he fertilises.
Tadpoles hatch after a couple of weeks, breathe through gills, graze on algae and later grow legs. Around two to three months after hatching, they absorb their tails and leave the water as tiny froglets.
Skin, tongue and eyes
As an adult you would breathe with lungs, but also through your moist skin, especially in water and during winter. You catch insects, slugs, spiders and worms with a sticky tongue attached at the front of your mouth that flips out at great speed. When you swallow, your eyeballs sink down to help push food towards your throat.
You spend most of the summer on land, often far from water, and return to breeding ponds in spring. Many common frogs hibernate at the bottom of ponds in mud or leaves, relying almost entirely on oxygen absorbed through the skin.
Everyone’s snack
Frogs are an important food for herons, storks, grass snakes, otters, foxes, polecats, fish and even dragonfly larvae, which eat tadpoles. Only a small fraction of eggs produce adult frogs. Those that survive may live several years in the wild. Major threats are drainage of wetlands, road traffic during spring migrations, pesticides and chytrid fungal disease, which has devastated amphibians worldwide.
