Tadpoles on 2005-05-20
Today we went to Bay Pond, Godstone for our science trip. Our aim was to gather information for the GCSE coursework. To start off the day it was cold, wet, rainy, miserable, humid... just bad weather. We went to an hour plus lecture on pond dipping, pond etcetc which wasn't that exciting but it kept us out of the rain.
After that we pond dipped in a large pond. In my group there was Mayling, Yesl, Kirstie and me. We didn't catch anything out of the ordinary. Except on the first sweep May caught a clam slash swans egg. We decided to call ourselves 'The Clam Crew'. Which was entertaining for a while. After that we ate lunch. I stuffed myself with a whole load of sandwiches, sweets. cereal bars, chocolate bars, cucumber and Ribena. T'was good.
In the afternoon the weather treated us better. It was sunny and surprisingly warm. We took a couple of sweeps and pleased ourselves with finding a few water boatmen, some little sticklebacks and a rather large rams horn snail. (???) At Kirstie's sweep she turned out around 25 tadpoles. Yesl and I screamed as all we saw was a squirmy mess in the net. We had our five minutes of fame with pictures and our friends gathering around us to see the tadpoles. Most of us were squeamish and screaming silently at the sight of the squidgly creatures. We put them back. On Kirstie's second sweep we got a few more but put them back immediately. May told her to throw them out further as we had two catches of them already. On my sweep I stayed away from where Kirstie had released the tadpoles. I swiped three times. When I pulled up the net I saw a lump of squirming black mess. I didn't know what it was so I screamed. Anija who was on the neighboring platform thought I had fell in. I held the net out at arms length and screamed at Kirstie (who was he less squeamish) to help me. She pulled them out onto the tray and all four of us encircled the it to which we lay our eyes upon hundreds of tadpoles. It was all slimy and slithery. It was creepy. Overall we caugh about 675 of them. It was nasty. It really took me by surprise. I can still imagine them. eww, eww, eww. (I've just gone into short sentence mode)
We reached school at 3:15pm (we usually get let out at 3:40pm). As there were exams and lessons going on there was no real reason to send us into the school as we would just make too much noise. So we were let out. I got home before 3:25pm. Which was nice as that 15 minutes made all the difference.
Rosie xxx