Secunda, the African clawed frog

A reader requested a picture of M.'s African clawed frog, Secunda. Here she is.



This is what M. writes about them.

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A little bit about Secunda. She is between 13 and 15 years old. She is not allowed to have any tank mates because she has eaten all the ones she had before. The lump in her stomach is eggs that haven't been absorbed into her body. They don't cause her any pain, and don't get in the way of her swimming. She has had them for about 5 years now. For a sense of scale, that is a large coffee mug. Secunda is also able to recognize me [M] (for the most part), and swims up to get food from my hand.>>

What M. doesn't tell you is that we started out with three African clawed frogs. They were named, Prima, Secunda, and Tertia. (Yes, this was during a Latin learning phase in our homeschooling saga.) I think Secunda ate one, and the other was found dried up and desiccated in some corner of the house months after her disappearance. Secunda got out of her tank once (maybe more than once?), thus we can attest to the species' hardiness. One evening, I heard a funny noise coming from underneath my bed, so hesitantly get out and look underneath. I was kind of thinking I would then see a scurry of little mouse feet, but wasn't looking forward to discovering that. Instead, I see an oddly moving dust bunny. Realizing that the maker of the noise underneath my bed was not some sort of rodent, I decided to look more closely at the moving dust bunny. If dust bunnies were actually going to start moving, I might be forced to do something about them. When I looked closer, I realized it was a frog. It was a frog I knew... Secunda... and she was covered in dust from her little roam about the house. She had somehow made it all the way from the tank in M.'s room into my bedroom. Not a short trip for a creature so small and not made for walking. I called M., and the frog was rescued.

For a creature that spends her days just kind of lying in her tank, she has a surprising amount of personality, and we are all a little fond of her.

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