Product Description

You receive a rare live tadpole with see-thru skin, (you can actually see his inside body parts working) Delivered via 1st class airmail in an insulated pack. Eventually, your tadpole will turn into a green frog that lives its entire life underwater - like a fish.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3063 in Toys & Games
• Brand: American Science and Surplus

Features

• Grow your own REAL frog
• Watch a live heartbeat up close
• Kit contains everything you need
• A certificate to send off for a free live Growafrog
• 3 way Guarantee.

Teacher Review
Watching a creature grow from birth to maturity is a special science lesson that most urban children seldom experience. The process of metamorphosis is especially fascinating. The Grow A Frog kit comes with a see-through 3.5-by-4.5-inch plastic aquarium, a small bag of tadpole food and another of nutri-rocks, a piece of fake seaweed, and a detailed handbook with directions. Send in the mail-ready card and within a few weeks your child will receive a special tadpole grown in a Florida lab. (Many guarantees are put forth in the directions about the safe, humane mailing process.) The translucent skin of the tadpoles allows children to see the inner organs. Adult frogs have an average lifespan of five years but the record is 15 years. These special frogs live full-time in fresh water. Fresh spring water is required in the tadpole stage. --Lair Showalter, mother and elementary school teacher

Customer Reviews

Be prepared for a commitment...
My husband bought the Grow-a-Frog kit for our daughter when she was three. It amused her briefly, taught her a little something, and provided her a new pet, so life was good.

That was nine years ago. Beware. When your tadpole grows into a frog, you will need to send away to the company for the frog kit, which consists of a larger environment and a different type of food. We also received a "bonus" frog in the mail with our order, which we did not ask for. Unfortunately, this frog was much larger than the one we had raised, and it ate our old friend one night while we were sleeping. This was also a good learning experience for our daughter, I suppose, but not for "Lily..."

Our bonus frog is still alive and going strong, all these years later. Before you consider buying this "toy," please think about the commitment involved to the living creature(s) you will be bringing into your home. Do some research. These are African Clawed Frogs, and you can find plenty of information about them on the Internet, such as life span (up to 30 years), and habitat needs. These are aquatic frogs, which means they can never live outside of a water-filled tank, making them more similar to fish than to the frogs you may find in your backyard. The small plastic cubes provided by the company are not nearly large enough to comfortably house one of these animals, let alone two. Our frog now lives in a five-gallon fishtank, which still seems a bit small for him.

One thing you may want to consider before purchasing this item is the ethical implications involved. The company breeds frogs and sends them out to customers indiscriminantly, without ever knowing or seemingly caring if the animals will be adequately cared for. These frogs will NOT survive if you let them go in the wild, so please take that into account. Your child may tire of his new pet in a month, but you will still need to care for the animal for many years.

Although this product does have some educational value, I believe your child can adequately learn the same lessons from a book, video, or trip to a local pond. If you're ready to adopt a new family member, however, this may be the perfect "toy" for you.

Fun learning experience
It's great to find something that is this fun and educational for the whole family. My daughter, who is five, learned a lot from seeing the frog's metamorphosis. Please realize that the tadpoles cannot be sent when the weather is too cold or too warm. I read reviews on another site where people complained about this. We got our tadpole and it came in a foam box with a plastic bag in the center containing the tadpole in water. It was clear and had little whiskers. It also had the front appendages already. When you read the book you realize this is a special frog created in a lab and not your average pond frog/tadpole so it is supposed to look like this. It will always remain in water unlike regular frogs. You can even see the heart beat and food digestion since the tadpole is clear in color which is really neat. It turns darker as it starts to go through metamorphosis. Read the book completely as soon as you open the box before you do anything else. It's easy to miss little things that will be important with the water. The book is written to be entertaining which it is, but when you are a busy parent it can become annoying. I wish it came with a bullet list with just the need-to-knows for parents.

When we got our stage two habitat (which you must get for when the frog completes metamorphosis or so they say) it came with a free froglet. They say they do this because frogs are such social animals. They warn you however to go through this staging process before you put them together so they become used to one another. Basically, you put them in separate containers next to each other for 48 hours and keep them well fed. You must read through the cutesy new booklet too as things are a little different with the water once they are froglets. We opted to pay extra and get the "rare white froglet" as our second. It was actually orange, but it's still cool to have the two different colors. We were worried when we first got the kit because there was a leak in the new frog's bag from poor packaging and it was just about out of water. It looked dead, but I put it temporarily into a cup with spring water until I could read the book and figure out what to do. It lived and is fine even though ultimately you are supposed to put them in tap water purified with their crystals they send at this stage (spring water is only for the tadpole stage except initially when you clean the little granules in the stage 2 tank). At first I thought the whole two frog thing was just a way to make more money on frog food, but I do think they enjoy each other now that they are used to one another. They say it is VERY rare to have them mate, but I'm wondering about ours. They spend an awful lot of time "socializing" on top of one another. I'll post again if we get any new very rare tadpoles.

Sturdy, economical, simple and a real bargain!
The Grow-A-Frog kit was a Christmas present for my frog-lovin' 7 year old. Let me just say right up front that the packaging is simple and the tank is a simple cube shape. For us that was more than fine- I was more interested in the contents than the frills, bells and whistles included on other tanks. Additionally, the tank was made of sturdy plastic. It held up to being dropped (while empty, of course) several times prior to the frogs arrival.

Not only do I heartily recommend this but I'd like to share why I'm thrilled with this product:

1.) Educational Value- The kit came with an engagingly written booklet that includes instructions on set-up, care, feeding, troubleshooting, etc... and has a hotline number for froggy questions. The book was written in such a way that it keeps kids interested without talking down to them. It's also incredibly informative about frogs in general.

2.) Sturdy plastic- Apparently this is not ubiquitous in frog habitats available on the market. This holds up to my 5 boys. That says a lot for it's quality.

3.) Value for price. In addition to being significantly less expensive than comparable products, it has a lot of bang for the buck. You get the tadpole shipped free (not all of them do that!), you get the habitat, food, and a record keeping/instructional booklet with the kit.

4.) Great customer service!!! The Grow-A-Frog folks had the tadpole to us in 1 week and 1 day after we mailed out our postcard. Taking into account that we mailed out the postcard the day after Christmas that's pretty amazing!!!!