Doug vs. the interweb

October 19th, 2009 2:10 PM

My dude

I think my pickerel frog broke its back somehow, or at least that's the best guess I can make currently as to his malaise. He was crouched about looking sullen, which isn't too strange considering how antisocial he is, and it seemed like he was trying to molt. After throwing in some extra crickets, he jumped about, but then fell into the water, writhing about, somersaulting over and over like he was wrestling with an invisible snake. I lifted him out and back onto land, where he just slouched, angled off to the side like half his body was paralyzed or something (though, I saw him move all four legs). He's contorted his body slightly back and to the side and won't relax. While I watched him, he rolled off into the water a couple times, each time with the same flailing effect.

Perhaps he is just terrible at molting. Earlier, it seemed like that's what he was starting to do, and maybe it's gotten tangled, though there's no molting skin visible anymore. Perhaps it's something seasonable, because by rights they should be hibernating by now. I've got a water heater in there to keep it more consistent, though I think that since I'm going to be having them through the winter, I'll need to rig up a heat lamp as well.

I decided to put the bloke on suicide watch, so he's sitting in a tiny tank next to me, and he's actually sitting normally, which is better than the drunken sprawl he was affecting before. Actually, it's kind of nice having a programming buddy, though he probably doesn't care about the deadlock I'm trying to debug. And the absolute cutest amphibian moment just happened: as I was lifting him out of the tank to put him into the smaller one, he wrapped his tiny front arms around my thumb and held on. I'm not about to anthropomorphize the actions of a potentially dying frog, but that was some eerily cute stuff right there.