The Science Project, and the Mystery of the Zombie Frog

“I can’t find any bugs!” The boy called out from the porch. I let out a long sigh. I had just picked up my phone, planning to type a four word sentence without interruption. No such luck. We had spent the hour prior getting school done for the day at the kitchen table, other than his science project we had left for last.

A few weeks ago I was thumbing through the shelves at the thrift store and stumbled across a first grade public school science textbook. You know the type—the almost iridescent cover with the up-close picture of some fierce wild animal. It is supposed to intrigue you, but of course after one year the graffiti left by its first owner becomes more intriguing.

The shiny cover is always a false promise. The content is generally dumbed-down to accommodate the simplest student. This one in particular aims to teach six and seven-year-olds the same material my son was doing in our Montessori-style preschool. No matter for our purposes—science generally isn’t taught in kindergarten, and my son finds the simple projects amusing.

Today’s science project: create a house for bugs. Because, you know, animals need air, water, and food to survive. We live in a humid subtropical climate, surely there are bugs to be found in January, right?

The boy trotted into the house, sprinkling dirt in a trail behind him from the plastic humus container I’d retrieved out of recycling. Humus, yuck. The bugs should have eaten the contents and then moved into the container, I mumbled. By then there was a nice layer of grey Florida sand, a twig, and a couple blades of grass in what was formerly a house for humus.

“Alright, let’s go out by the driveway. There’s always some rolly-pollies out there,” I said, slipping my flip-flops on to slosh through the swampy grass.

Nope. Not one.

“Mama!” The tot screamed from two feet away from me, like I was a block away. “I want to find bugs too!”

“Right, right,” I mumbled. “There’s got to be some somewhere around here. Maybe there are some nestled under the leaves.” I grabbed a stick, swishing the accumulated brown Chinese elm leaves out of the way, and unearthing a swarm of fire ants. We don’t want those jerks, I mumbled under my breath.

We went about the driveway. Nothing but jerk fire ants. In the spirit of science, I was developing a hypothesis: the fire ants were trying to conquer the yard, and possibly the neighborhood, the city, and beyond. Devious, highly organized creatures they are. Maybe I should try to stop them. I was considering this when the tot jarred me to attention with words at a volume appropriate for a football game stadium.

“Mama! I want to find a bug!”

We went to the backyard. I started with the log pile. What luck, under the second log was a squirmy little brown bug with pinchers on its butt. I yelled for the boy to come running, and we knocked the thing into the vacant humus house. In the process, a frog zombie attacked me.

I don’t know exactly how to explain this. I was holding a semi-deteriorated oak log, shaking it furiously to knock the pinchy-creature into its new home, when the zombie jumped onto my leg and then to the ground. Then it just lay on the ground with long legs ominously outstretched, motionless. Dead as a doornail.

Or was it? I approached cautiously—I like frogs. Six inches of grey colored possessed frog legs were just resting there, waiting to spring to life again. I inched closer. Dead, definitely dead, live frogs don’t rest like that, must be dead, it isn’t going to move, definitely not moving, nope can’t move… The wind blew the grass around it, I screamed, ran away, and otherwise showed the children that I am a non-scientific person.

I like frogs, really I do. Zombie frogs? Not so much.

As I recollected my cool and calm demeanor, I was glad to see that we had at least scored the pinchy-butt creature for our humus house. The boy was standing on one of the logs I had tossed aside, rocking back and forth like five-year-olds like to do, and then, like five-year-olds often do, he ate dirt. In the process of falling flat onto the ground, he spilled the humus house. Mr. Pinchy-Butt high-tailed it to the closest log and disappeared.

I wasn’t going back to the log stack of zombie frogs. Where there is one frog zombie, there is bound to be another. I led the kids to the edge of the woods, where Hurricane Irma took out a nice oak tree, and where the trunk still rested, slowing decomposing. Like a dead frog is supposed to do.

The bark peeled up beautifully, and then we shrieked with joy to find little black beetles scurrying away for their freedom. “Come back here!” The boy shouted as he scrambled to pick one up, but it eluded us. After a few of these attempts, and the tot shouting things that people across the neighborhood probably heard, we were still unsuccessful. Those tiny beetles are crazy fast. So, we opted for something that is crazy slow: two tiny snails, tiptoeing their way slowly, slowly, slowly down the bark.

The humus house now has two comfortably slow and non-possessed snails living on a wet piece of bark.

Science Project: complete

The Mystery of the Zombie Frog: unresolved