Meet Phelps: the Frog with at Least Five Lives
Note: for privacy purposes all posts containing my family use altered names for each of them. I chose to use the same aliases that I used in the Stanton Sisters series. If you are interested in those books, they can be found here.
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I have had a lot of pets over the years. By the time I arrived in this world my parents already had a beagle named “Queenie.” Since then, I’ve had dogs, cats, fish of all sorts, rabbits, a baby raccoon (for a very short time), gerbils, bearded dragons, parakeets, green anoles, a tree frog, hamsters, guinea pigs and a turtle. Oh yeah, and let’s not forget about the chickens. (See that story here, if you missed it.)
Despite the knowledge that they are animals, with a much shorter life span than humans, I do tend to get very attached to our pets. I also hate to disappoint my children and watch them suffer when one dies. So we really give it our best to know what we’re getting into ahead of time (as much as you can) and to see it through. Thus begins the story of Phelps, the pet to end all pets.
The year was 2021 and Mia and I had set out on the task of finding a guppy for our fish tank, to replace the one of hers that had just died. Ours was a 10 gallon heated and filtered tank with - now - two small, male guppies in it. We were specifically looking for just the right MALE companion for them. (I will tell you about our female fish fiasco another time.)
It was a chilly, cloudy morning in December when we stepped into the pet store that fateful day, and started browsing around the aquatic pets section. I began drifting back and forth between the three tanks that held a vast assortment of beautiful male guppies. There were golden and black leopard guppies, teal-green shimmery guppies, bright orange and white guppies, multi-colored ones, purple-y ones, bright yellow spotted ones… I was leaning toward one of the orange and black striped ones with a beautiful flowing tail.
“Hey Mia, how about one of these-” I’d begun, when I heard a small gasp from Mia. I never got around to finishing that suggestion.
“MOM! Can we get HIM?!”
I turned from the delicately flowing guppy to see what she was pointing at, and had to suppress the surprise factor before it reached my face.
“Him” wasn’t beautiful. “Him” didn’t have a flowing tail. Him wasn’t a guppy. Him wasn’t even a fish.
Him was an aquatic frog.
(Okay, so it was actually a baby-version of this, but you get the idea…)
😳 👀 🫢
“Uhhhh… weeeeellllll…”
Those eager little eyes staring expectantly up at my face forced me to do some really fast calculations. The tag on the tank read “African Dwarf Frog.” I opened google on my phone and started researching away. Right off the bat I found three or four great sites with complete care-guides, and looked through them. “ADF”s - as they’re called - were supposed to stop growing at about 2 ½” long; so he wouldn’t get much bigger. He could live his full 5-year life span in a 10 gallon tank peacefully with other fish. We already had the necessary equipment (heater and filter).
This was less research than I was typically comfortable with doing before buying an animal, but it seemed pretty straight-forward, and it was a frog, after all. I looked back at the tag. The frog was on sale for $3.49, making it less expensive than the guppies. But the guppiiiieeeees! I glanced longingly back at the beautiful fish with a sigh.
We left the store ten minutes later with a tiny container of floating pellet food, an ecstatically happy 10-year-old, and a very ugly frog in a plastic bag. Mia set to work naming him before we were out of the parking lot. “Phelps” got his moniker from his ceaseless lap-swimming at Olympic speeds, much like a certain Mr. Michael of the same last name.
We got him home and acclimated - the temp and pH in the tank were in the right range - and introduced him to the guppy bro-duo. He settled in nicely, paid zero attention to the fish, and resumed his lap-swimming around the tank. I did more in-depth studying that night, to learn how much and when to feed him, his specific lighting requirements and things to look out for…
Phelps was an instant star in our house. Feeding time was genuine entertainment. He would chase down the floating pellets and attack them as though they required killing, then beat himself in the face with his fronts “hands” until he’d stuffed them in, and blink-gag them down. Once finished, his belly would look like a stuffed hacky-sack. Phelps would also - we learned in a moment of startled, gag-worthy surprise - shed his skin about once a week as he grew. And then eat it. 🤢
He was so ugly that he was almost cute.
A month went by and he thrived - which just meant that he ate and grew and shed and ate that. Another month went by much the same, and Phelps’ skin was taking on a nice dark, mottled green-brown tone with blotches. He continued to eat and grow and shed - well past the expected 2 ½ inches. Then past 3-4 inches.
In April one of the guppies mysteriously disappeared. In May the other one did.
By June I was getting rather suspicious about the “dwarf” word on that pet store tag. I started researching again. While everything that I had read about a dwarf frog was true, the frog in my tank was actually an “African Clawed frog” instead. Stupid pet store people. To be sure, the differences in appearance are very subtle, but the fact that Phelps had webbing only on his back feet - while his front digits remained independent - was the dead give-away.
Research took a new direction, and the new was… interesting.
African clawed frogs, it turns out, get about 5-6” long, eat everything that fits in their mouth (including small fish) and live for 20-25 years. At this point I was calculating how long it would be until he’d move to college with Mia. All of the care-guides I could find did insist that he would be happy and healthy in the 10 gallon tank as long as he was alone, which he’d already taken care of, so I didn’t make any changes at the time.
The most shocking product of this research, though, was a discovery that I made while looking at the diagrams on the bottom of the page. As it would turn out, Phelps was a girl.
We should’ve figured, I mean, all 4 kids and the dog… it was bound to be the case. Still… try breaking that news to your 11-year-old. There were tears.
Once it was concluded that animals “don’t have to be boys just because they’re ugly” and that her name didn’t need to change because Michael Phelps' mother also had the last name of Phelps so it could just be her last name also, things settled down. Somehow this new development made her an even bigger star with my kids and their friends. The shock passed and things were going swimmingly.
One morning in August, while Mia was headed through the kitchen on her way out the door for the bus, I heard a little “eek!”.
“Mom! Phelps is in the kitchen!”
WHAT?!?!
Sure enough, despite a full hood on the tank with only a small opening for the filter and one for the food to drop in, that beastly aquatic explorer had decided to go on an adventure at some point in the night. Only African Clawed Frogs aren’t supposed to be out of the water for very long, so she’d started to shrivel up and get sticky, and was now covered in a thick layer of dust and hair (mostly of the dog variety). She was also looking rather blood-shot and had somehow ripped off a toenail.
I scooped the poor creature up and plopped her back in the tank. It was like watching one of those little plastic pills with an expanding foam animal in it - you know the ones... Over the next hour or so she reinflated, and filled the tank with all manner of floor filth, probably from under the dishwasher where we suspect she’d been hiding. The blood-shot tint faded and then vanished, and after a couple of days she started eating again. That was the first time I tried to kill the frog.
Following her trip to the kitchen I sewed a mesh netting over the entire hood, closing off all gaps while still allowing for air and food and filtration and heater cord… All was going well except for the cleaning. Over the summer it got a bit ridiculous, needing to be done every 4-5 days or the pH levels would get unhealthy and the water would look disgusting. I bought a better filter and kept up the gravel vacuuming twice a week. One such occasion Mia was watching.
“Mom, what happens if she eats a rock?”
“Uh, I don't know but I don’t think she will, these are pretty big ones…”
Phelps immediately ate a rock. I swear to you she’d never done that before. If I didn’t know better I’d think she really just wanted to spite me. Back to Google; horror stories abounded and the prognosis wasn’t good. I spent that night preparing Mia for the worst. I spent the next night doing the same. And the next night. And the next. By the fifth night I started Googling how long it would take something to pass a frog’s digestive system. There wasn't a clear answer. Two weeks later we all figured we’d dodged a rock-shaped frog-bullet, and that was the second time I tried killing the frog.
Despite an insane amount of cleaning, by September it was clear that the tank was just too small for our massive amphibian, and that she wasn’t “happy and healthy” and thriving like she should be.
If I was going to be upgrading the tank set-up for this frog-strocity I only wanted to do it once, and I wanted to make it a good one. I found an even better filter, a nice, big 20-gallon tank, appropriately sized gravel… and live plants.
Her new tank came and we moved her in, along with the plants. Which started a whole new adventure; snails. Not the nice big “mystery snails” that we’d had in the past, but the pesky little nuisance ones that procreate like crunchy little underwater rabbits. I’d already read the info, and I'd known it was likely to happen, and I was prepared to do battle. I will tell you that I fought valiantly for 5 months. But with the snails came other organisms of the microscopic nature, which brought new issues, and Phelps eventually developed a mild fungal infection. I read up on it, and decided that the safest thing to try first was a salt-bath. I followed the instructions and the white spot went away, and all was well.
A month later it came back, and we repeated the process.
Again, about a month later it returned. For the third time I set up the bowl of warm tank-water on the island in the kitchen, added the measure salt, and plopped the frog into her spa while I set to work on cleaning the tank. I went back several minutes later and lifted the towel off of the bowl and what I saw was the stuff of nightmares. I still don’t know what happened, other than that I had a new container of salt and perhaps something in it was different than the salt I’d used before, but Phelps was basically dead. She was entirely white, including her eyes, and rigid. She looked like a strange plastic dog-toy. With gloved hands I carefully scooped her out of the water, in complete shock and horror, and to my surprise she made one, tiny, gasping squeak.
She didn’t move. She wouldn’t swim. She couldn’t seem to get herself to the surface to breathe. She was so stiff I was quite sure she was a goner. But I couldn’t even imagine having to tell Mia, and I felt so, so terribly bad for what I’d done to her. If there was anything that could be done for her I had to try.
I rinsed her off in warm water from the tank, and started moving her around in the water and bringing her to the surface. One tiny gasp. I repeated the process about 20-30 seconds later, and got another little gasp.
I spent the next 90 minutes doing CPR (by the method above) on an aquatic frog, crying miserably over her and pleading with her to live. I was basically frog-life-support. For an agonizing hour and a half.
Her color returned. Her limbs loosened up. Eventually she could kick her back legs. Finally she could make it to the surface and breathe. She shed at least 2 layers of skin, and she didn’t eat for a couple of days, but she LIVED.
That was the third time I tried to kill the frog. I think that’s the one that may have damaged our working relationship.
I decided it would be best to just go back to plastic plants, and do a complete snail-purge. More research and careful planning gave me a complete step-by-step guide for total snail-annihilation, without damaging the frog. After months and months of snail-wars I marked the calendar, rounded up the necessary supplies and prepared for V-S-Day (Victory over Snails Day). When it arrived, I discovered that Phelps had outgrown my net. No biggie, I just lowered the bowl right into the tank and scooped her out. Once she was safely contained on the kitchen island I followed the steps with precision:
Remove and dispose of all gravel ✔️
Empty, bleach and thoroughly rinse tank, filter, heater, and decorative pieces ✔️
Replace filter cartridge ✔️
Set up and refill the tank, adding de-chlorination fluid ✔️
Things were going great so far and there was only one more step.
Rinse the frog and return it to the tank
I looked at Phelps in her glass bowl on the counter. She looked back at me. We were still clarely not on speaking terms since the salt-incident, but I could read the expression: “Nah-huh. You’ve tried to kill me too many times, keep your hands to yourself.”
Alas, it had to be done.
I rinsed and filled the “frog tank bucket” with warm, clean water and set it on the counter next to the bowl she occupied. I really wished that I had a big enough net, but I was going to have to do my best. I scooped her into the little net and tried to cover the opening with my hand. It failed.
I learned two valuable lessons in the moments that followed~
Lesson One: Frog legs pack a punch. (She had no business being that strong!)
That stupid frog flew out of the net in a perfect swan-dive that peaked at about 6’ in the air, and landed SPLAT on the kitchen floor on the other side of the island. Upside down. I’d finally killed her. Nope, she moved. I crept around the island and grabbed what I assumed was an injured and limp frog - with my bare hands. She was less injured than she appeared.
Lesson Two: African Clawed frogs are impossibly slimy.
Like, fits-through-a-pinhole-between-your-fingers slimy.
Swan-dive #2 carried her back over the island (not the kind of “island hopping” I would recommend) and SPLAT on the floor on the other side.
Heavy sigh. I sneak (not sure why) back around the island to find her right-side-up, and headed for the space under the dishwasher. Sneak turned to sprint and I cut her off just in time. It was a stare-down that lasted for several sunlit days (a.k.a. about 3 seconds) before I heard the distinct click-click-ing that were the dog’s toenails on the hardwood floor. The “interesting” sounds of battle in the kitchen had piqued Piper’s interest, and she was arriving to investigate. This was going to get bad really fast. I yelled - holding one hand up toward the dog, and the other toward the frog - “STOP!” I don’t exactly know what I expected to happen, but they both froze and stared at me like I was crazy. (Don’t you even say it.)
I was basically Christ Pratt’s character in the Jurassic World movie, trying to figure out what to do next to survive the raptors in my kitchen. I reached - very slowly - for the bucket on the counter, and moved it to the floor. Then, in one lightning fast move, I scooped the frog into it and covered the whole bucket with the shirt - that I had on. It took about 0.5 seconds to calculate the risk in this and nearly freak out. When the splashing noise ceased I peaked under the shirt into the eyes of a frog that hated me more than any other creature on the planet. But the orders remained unchanged: “Rinse the frog.”
I reached in and dunked her stupid self 3 or 4 times - I could practically hear her thoughts with each dunk, “I - Hate - You-”
And then I walked the bucket to the tank and speed-scooped her back into that, slamming the netted hood down before she could bail back out. PHEW. Done.
That was the forth time I tried to kill the frog.
In other news, we have a bigger fish net now, and the snails haven’t come back yet, so I’d say things are going well. Phelps is as healthy (I think) and as popular as ever.
Waiting impatiently for her Hogwarts letter? Mia took a dry-erase marker and played dress-up with her recently.
I don’t know if she’s forgiven me yet or not. Our morning coffee conversations are completely one-sided, buuuuuut…
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