Animal · Germany, France, United Kingdom
Common frog
Rana temporaria — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common frog is one of the very first animals to wake up after winter, and in a mild year it is already laying its spawn in February. Clumps of jelly with black dots float in cold water long before the trees have leaves.
Picture credit: Chmee2 (CC BY 3.0) · Richard Bartz (CC BY-SA 2.5) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common frog live?
Home: in damp meadows, woods and garden ponds.
In the wild it lives in these countries: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Poland, Austria.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 6–9 cm long. It weighs about 0 023 kilograms. On the menu: meat.
The story behind it
Common frogs sleep through the winter, some buried in soft soil, others lying on the bottom of a pond and breathing through their skin. On the first mild, wet nights at the end of winter they set off for the water where they were born, sometimes crossing roads in hundreds. A female lays a clump of a few hundred to several thousand eggs; most will be eaten, and only a handful of tadpoles ever become frogs. The tadpoles start by scraping algae and later switch to meat, and in early summer tiny froglets leave the water all together. On land an adult frog catches slugs, worms, spiders and insects with its sticky tongue. Its colour shifts slowly from yellow-brown to almost grey, which lets it vanish in wet grass.
Find it on the globe
Common frog is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
How do I tell a frog from a toad?
A common frog has smooth damp skin, long back legs and it hops; a toad has dry warty skin, shorter legs and walks. Frogs also lay their eggs in round clumps, toads in long strings.
Where does the common frog live?
In almost all of Europe and on into Asia, and it is one of the few amphibians that reach beyond the Arctic Circle. A garden pond suits it well, as long as there is damp cover nearby.
Why does it spawn so early in the year?
Spawn and tadpoles need many weeks, and small ponds can dry out in summer. Starting in February gives the young the whole spring, even though a late frost sometimes freezes part of the spawn.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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