Melvin Lawrence, age l0, of shreVeport, La., for his question:
What happens to the tail of a tadpole?
The greatest miracle of nature is a living cell. The small body of a tadpole is made of millions of living cells and each one performs many miraculous duties. Teams of busy Cells work together to carry out the orders that change the young tadpole into a smiling old frog.
Metamorphosis is ont of those fine sounding words that young persons like to learn. It means transform or change from one form into another. Our bodies cannot transform themselves into dogs or even monkeys and metamorphosis seems like a miracle to us. But to a frog it is not a miracle. His body transformed itself from a tadpole and a tadpole is an entirely different animal from a frog.
The miracle of metamorphosis happens quite naturally in the life of every frog. His life begins as a round black egg invades a ball of glassy jelly and it begins in water. The black egg hatches into a black tadpole that must live in water. The helpless infant sticks to a water weed with a small sucker under the spot where his chin should be. In a few days the living cells of his body grow a pair of eyes and a small round mouth. Now he can nibble on weeds and floating scraps of food.
Soon he sprouts gills where his ears should be. The edges of his little black tail begin to disappear. His tail becomes strong and solid and he wriggles it to swim through the water, gulping as he goes. each gulp goes back through the gills and the gills take out the oxygen he needs, for the tadpole breathes water instead of air.
He lives this life for several weeks. Then his body gets ready to change into that of a land dwelling animal. Orders are sent to the living cells and a pair of back legs begin to sprout under his tail. Then a pair of front legs begin to sprout from his shoulders. Meantime a still greater miracle is happening. The gills that take dissolved oxygen from the water are changing into lungs. And lungs take oxygen from the air.
These changes use up a lot of energy and the tadpole has a huge appetite. He now has the legs and lungs he will need for a life on the land. Gradually his tail becomes smaller, for it will not be needed. The tail material is taken into his body and reused to help the little frog to grow into a bigger frog.
An ordinary tadpole takes about eight weeks to change into a frog. As he grows from an infant into an adult he becomes bigger, as we do. But his body also goes through the miraculous change called metamorphosis. It transforms its feathery gills into a pair of lungs and exchanges its fishy tail for four frog legs.