BABY COME BACK

This amphibian's colossal tadpole shrinks down into adulthood

- Nick Baker

POND DIPPING IN SOUTH AMERICA IS surprising, mainly because it isn't that different from pond dipping in a British ditch.

There are familiar faces in the water: beetles, pond skaters, water boatmen, damselfly and dragonfly nymphs, even the odd tadpole. That said, sometimes the scale of things can take you by surprise - for example, when I encountered my first Pseudis paradoxa tadpole, known as the paradoxical frog.

Usually, tadpoles don’t get much bigger than a fingernail but this brute of a thing made my net bulge. When extracted, it filled my palm, leaving the considerable length of its ridged, muscular tail to flop over the edge. This gargantuan tadpole measured more than 21cm long from nose to tip - though it still fell short of the record length of 27cm attained for this species.