How Do They Do That?

A couple of weeks ago, Jack tossed some shrubs into a water-filled five-gallon plastic bucket, to root them. I’m a martinet about standing water, since I’m a mosquito magnet and entomophobic. Everybody knows that mosquitoes lay eggs in standing water, and we all hate mosquitoes, right? Even more so since we’ve heard that dengue lurks here in Costa Rica’s Central Valley.

I somehow missed this particular violation of the no-standing-water law, though the offending bucket stood just outside the kitchen window where I wash our dishes, underneath our Guyaba tree.

The bucket sat for a few rainy days, and then I started hearing an unfamiliar croaking from behind the kitchen. The normal nighttime cacophony of bird sounds included an occasional owl hoot or a Whip-poor-will whistle. I was used to the staccato chirp of the geckoes, the sing-song buzz of the cicadas, and the shrill trill of the crickets, but the croaking was new. Costa Rica is home to about a hundred and fifty different frogs, but we don’t hear them much because we’re far from water.

Last week, I looked up from my spot at the kitchen sink, and noticed Jack talking to a young neighborhood boy outside. Suddenly, Jack began hopping around, and pointing to the bucket. Lacking a Spanish vocabulary, he’s become adept at pantomime.

“Tadpoles,” the boy said.

“There are tadpoles in the bucket?” I asked. “How did they get in there?”

The first time I saw a tadpole, I was traveling in Indonesia with my daughter, Bonnie. We bicycled through the central mountains of Bali, from teeming Kuta, in the South, to the placid shores of Lovina, in the North, staying in three-dollar-a-night hostels and guest houses along the way.

Those places had extremely primitive facilities. The toilet was a hole in the ground, and toilet paper was non-existent. Instead, a trough filled with water was provided. Imagine my surprise when I dipped my hand into the trough for water, and noticed that little creatures with tails swam in it. “There are things in the water,” I yelled. “Creepy little sea-horses.”

“They’re tadpoles,” said Bonnie.

“Oh. What are tadpoles, and how did they get there?”

That’s the same question I pondered about the tadpoles in our bucket. Now, of course, I recognize tadpoles, but I still wonder how the frogs got their eggs in there. Did they hop into the bucket to mate then leave the eggs behind? Balance for precarious sex on the rim of the bucket? Or maybe tree frogs laid their eggs on a leaf in our Guyaba tree, just over the bucket, then the eggs miraculously slipped off, landing in the bucket. It’s a mystery.