Tadpoles have large heads in proportion to their bodies with 2 eyes and a small mouth, no legs or arms, and a long broad tail that they wiggle to propel themselves through the water.
They only live in the water during this stage and breath with gills, but are still considered amphibious. A tadpole is the larval stage between egg and adult frog, and vary in sizes quite a bit depending on the type of frog or toad.
Tadpoles congregate in huge schools as they develop and can easily take over some ponds for a few weeks every year. Tadpoles, or pollywogs as I called them as a kid in Georgia, are the metamorphic offspring of frogs and toads (salamanders, and newts too!). I realized that Egyptians must have experienced absolutely massive numbers of tadpoles filling the shorelines of the mighty Nile, and it made a bit more sense how a single tadpole could represent such a massive number as well as representing fertility and proliferation. The Egyptians endured some doozy like plagues, including a plague of frogs. I wondered why would a tadpole be used to represent this massive number? How did ancient Egyptians relate such a massive number to a puny tadpole? And then I remembered the plagues…. The image of a tadpole was drawn to represent the number and quantity of 100,000. I thought it was pretty cool that the tadpole made it into the sacred carvings of this ancient culture.
I learned while researching this blog topic of tadpoles that the ancient Egyptians used the image of a tadpole in their system of hieroglyphics. TADPOLES IN YOUR BACKYARD WATER GARDEN POND
0 kommentar(er)
