Pond study

[jospot]

Good evening all,

I'm new here with a bit of a long 1st post (sorry) I'm a student at the University of Brighton working on my Environmental Biology dissertation. It is based around pond use by urban and rual Common frogs. The study involves rearing tadpoles from spawn in the lab to analyse growth and development. I'm having a bit of trouble sourcing ponds however. Is there anyone in the Hastings (or nearby areas) area that owns a pond or knows of anyone in the area that owns a pond that is used by Common frogs for spawning. I would be ever so grateful if anyone could help out. The more ponds the better. The tadpoles will be returned to their native ponds.

Thank you!

Jos

[Dogghound]

This might sound daft, but how long do you have until you need to finish your dissertation? No spawn will be layed until around March then tadpoles may take around 3 months to emerge from the pond, which means you wont have results until around June/July. (Subject to high variability). Would this be a problem? might be better to study the time it takes them to develop their hind legs? although this may be well into May.

Welcome to WAB too, you will find plenty of wildlife advice here.

Also it is a good idea for a project, the only problem I can see is tadpole development and growth is highly dependable on pond size, food availability, temperature, habitat i.e water quality, nutrient imput etc. These factors affect the tadpole as it grows and would not be easy to re-create in a lab in respect to their natal ponds. So might be worth concentraiting more on genetics and seeing if different isolated populations grow faster or slower, larger or smaller.