If you were a bullfrog, you could live just about anywhere in the United States, including right here in Ohio. You would live by a pond, lake, bog or river where the water was still or slow moving, shallow and warm. You would also like to live among lots of vegetation where you could hide from things that might eat you, like herons, kingfishers, turtles, snakes and raccoons.

A bullfrog starts life as one of up to 25,000 eggs laid in a big sheet of jelly at the surface of the water and later hatches into a tadpole. It has a combined head and body, gills to breathe with and a long tail for swimming, but no legs. Bullfrogs can stay a tadpole from one to three years and grow up to six inches long. Some researchers think the longer the bullfrog is a tadpole, the bigger it will be when it is grown and the better chance it will have at survival.

Adult bullfrogs have big appetites but they don’t normally work for their food. Usually bullfrogs sit and wait for dinner come to them. This works well since they eat just about anything that moves and that they can swallow, including fish, turtles, other frogs, insects and young snakes. If a bullfrog had the opportunity, it might even eat a bird or a bat! Doesn’t that sound delicious?