The Last Word On Nothing

When my first daughter started getting teased for her obsession with sharks I comforted her by lying that everyone had an animal they especially loved. When pressed I randomly choose frogs (I was hung over and just wanted quiet), which started a pro-frog avalanche: Walls filled with frog paintings, desks with frog playdoh figurines, and my birthday cakes with green and yellow frosting and frog-related presents.  It worked. Five years later I was decidedly pro frog. My Brooklyn apartment had three terrariums and each month I received both Reptile Magazine (under Dr. Jumpy Arnade) and a shipment of live crickets.

A year ago when I moved upstate, I hit frog jackpot. I hadn’t chosen my house based on its frog potential, but I couldn’t have done much better. It is on ten wet acres, has a small pond, and is surrounded by forest and wetlands. At night the house fills with the remarkably loud white noise of frogs sexing, punctuated by the sound of two bullfrogs in the pond sexing. After a rain my long driveway, lined by marshes, becomes a checkerboard of frogs hoping to sex.

My pond, besides being home to the two bullfrogs (since named Mario and Luigi), is filled with small frogs that live on the edges. On warmer nights I sprawl in the mud and bush, taking long exposures as they hunt beneath the moon. It has cost me a bevy of tick bites and my first case of Lyme disease.

This summer, until three week ago, was wet, and the noise at night especially loud. When the rain stopped, the noise also dropped, and my pool started filling with desperate frogs.

One of those frogs was a tiny spring peeper, about ¼ of an inch, one of tens of thousands who made up the nightly noise. You hear them, but since they don’t get bigger than 1½ inches and hide low in the tangle of grass and plants at waters edge, you rarely see them.

I collected the peeper to transfer with the other frogs to my pond, which has the only water remaining. This spring peeper was different though. It was missing an eye, its left being skinned over by a birth defect. I couldn’t put it back.

Instead I turned a jar into a small marsh, with moss, a few sticks and a water plant. I filled the bottom third with water and punched holes in the top.  I named him/her Pip (one eye, one I). For food the Internet told me fruit flies.

So I started farming fruit flies by filling a separate jar with old fruit, and harvesting them once a day with an old plastic newspaper delivery bag as a trap. So Pip now gets locally sourced (jar one foot away) and artisanal (only the slowest are chosen) fruit flies.

Pip has allowed me to see behind that nightly wall of sound, to see what spring peepers do when not peeping. Which is hunt: Pip is either in action or intentional inaction. He goes from strenuous anticipation (you can see him coiled tight) to pounce to long slow stretches across the jar. I haven’t seen him peep yet, but I doubt I would hear it, since he is so tiny.

He has also made me obsess. I root for him, counting how many flies he catches, mentally tallying their weight versus his weight, trying to figure out if he is getting enough food. He is growing I think, but I can’t be certain, ¼ of an inch is the same to me as ½ an inch. I am starting to worry I have only confined him to state of frog ennui, of a sexless life of boredom and slow starvation.  That worry has made it harder to fall asleep, since my Pip neuroses are magnified a thousand times over by sounds from outside. The once soothing white noise is now ten thousand Pips not hunting when I really think they should be hunting.

A week after Pip arrived and the rain still hadn’t come; the wetlands along my driveway shrunk to one muddy pool that was quickly drying up. It was bubbling with hundreds of tadpoles that had collected from the surrounding area. I passed the puddle twice, trying not to think of all the tiny squirming deaths, trying not to imagine each bubble as a larval Pip, all the while thinking of the empty aquarium in my basement.

The third time I carried the aquarium to the car, loaded a shovel and a pail, and plucked from the mud tiny, plump, squirming tadpoles. If they hadn’t been so dirty, so muddy, the stench of decay so strong, I could imagine eating them. They really are so plump.

I added pond water and watched as the aquarium settled; mud, leaves, and plants separated from the water and tadpoles.  For food they eat each other apparently. The tadpoles, which I named collectively Tadpole, were consuming the dead. I removed most of the bodies and added fresh pond scum, which, according to the Internet, is a tadpole treat. The dead I tossed off the porch, attracting birds, a glimpse into how it would of all ended if they hadn’t been moved to the aquarium.

Three times a day I remove recent tadpole graduates, ones with spindly growing legs and stubby diminishing tails. I release them in a small section next to my pond with plants and a tangle of plants to hide in. The recent graduates don’t have much of a chance, since snakes, fish, turtles, mice, and other larger frogs, including the bullfrogs Mario and Luigi will eat them.  Frogs attack this low probability of success with large numbers, laying a lot of eggs in hopes that a few of the marshes don’t dry up, that a few of the tadpoles aren’t eaten, and that they grow up to lay their own eggs.

It is all, from a pro frog perspective, rather pointless. Pip will live maybe one year longer than he/she would have without my jar. He/she will spend that time always hunting, just trying to stave off death. The five hundred or so tadpoles will probably live two weeks longer than in the mud, graduate to frog, and to be turned into fish food, or other frog food, or snake food, or turtle food, or bird food.

The whole being pro frog thing, a decision I took to quell a pesky kid, has been my only immersion into the natural sciences. It hasn’t given me a very romantic view of nature. I mean I really do like frogs and I really do like watching nature, but man oh man is it rough to be a frog, or an ant, or really anything other than a human.

It has actually made me more cynical. I wish I could say otherwise, and spout on about the beauty of life, living and creatures. I can’t though. I do respect how remarkably agile, functional, efficient, and diverse it is, how there are so many different strategies for staying alive. But the actual being alive part, unless you are very very very lucky, seems an awfully pointless exercise.

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Chris Arnade, a recurring guest-poster, received his PhD in physics from Johns Hopkins University in 1992. He spent the next 20 years working as a trader on Wall Street. He left trading in 2012 to focus on photography. His “Faces of Addiction” series explores addiction in the south Bronx. Follow him on Twitter: @Chris_arnade

All photos by the author.  Of course.  I mean, obviously.