How do frogs find ponds?

Question

Sometimes a person will build a pond in their back yard, and a little while later find a frog and some frogspawn in it.

But there might not be another pond or body of water around for some distance.

It’s not like the frogs got a smartphone update telling them there’s a new pond 100 metres away in such-and-such a direction.

So this suggests frogs are constantly wandering around waterless pond-less environments all the time unobserved, and that some are lucky enough to happen across ponds to live in?

In: 19

Answer 1

Aquatic eggs and larva will often be very small and relatively resilient to being out of water (for a few hours at least). This lets the eggs and larva ‘hitch a ride’ on animals that regularly travel from water source to water source, like many bird types.