How to Use tadpole in a Sentence

tadpole

noun
  • The toads and tadpoles are also easy prey due to their small stature.
    Zekriah Chaudhry, Twin Cities, 5 July 2019
  • Youngsters can be as tiny as a tadpole born from a poison dart frog.
    Erin Couch, The Enquirer, 4 Aug. 2024
  • For the next two months, the tadpoles stayed in the pens, nibbling on the algae.
    Joe Dworetzky, Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2019
  • Some electric tadpoles are front-wheel-drive, via hub motors in the two front wheels.
    Ben Coxworth, New Atlas, 27 Nov. 2024
  • Frogs and toads go from being tadpoles who only have gills to growing lungs.
    Beth Lipoff, Kansas City Star, 10 May 2024
  • The children fished for tadpoles in the stone pond while the rest of us snacked on fava beans and made small talk.
    Jamie Quatro, Travel + Leisure, 24 June 2023
  • There are eggs in a nest, frogs, a tadpole, deer and lambs and a whole woodchuck family.
    Mary Ann Grossmann, Twin Cities, 2 Apr. 2017
  • The mail-order tadpole that stuck around for almost two decades as an adult frog, cared for but not much cared about.
    Diana Arterian, Literary Hub, 19 Feb. 2026
  • The frogs, just past the tadpole stage, were bread in captivity.
    Karl Schneider, IndyStar, 3 Sep. 2025
  • Today’s update is that the embryo is the size of a lentil and looks a bit like a tadpole, tail and all.
    Refinery29 Australia Team, refinery29.com, 18 Mar. 2024
  • My childhood was watching tadpoles turn into frogs.
    Kevin Sintumuang, Outside, 6 Nov. 2025
  • The team hiked to the sites several times a week, trying to catch glimpses of the elusive tadpoles.
    Joe Dworetzky, Los Angeles Times, 25 July 2019
  • This suggests that the tadpole was in its late stage of metamorphosis.
    Laura Baisas, Popular Science, 30 Oct. 2024
  • The species can take up to four to five years to mature from the nascent tadpole stage to the adult frog stage, Lundy added.
    Zoe Sottile, CNN, 24 Sep. 2022
  • Cases in which tadpoles are nearly as big or bigger than their adult forms are rare in frogs and toads today.
    Christie Wilcox, science.org, 30 Oct. 2024
  • Yet all of them spawn as larvae that vaguely resemble tadpoles.
    Elizabeth Rayne, Ars Technica, 16 July 2023
  • The frogs would have to hitchhike across a state border to reach the area, and there’s some doubt tadpoles could even survive there.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 26 July 2018
  • The student begins his studies with the life cycle, as expressed in the tadpole.
    Leah Eskin, chicagotribune.com, 24 Apr. 2018
  • Of course, most of these tadpole companies don’t make it to maturity, but many do.
    Bruce Yandle, The Mercury News, 7 Jan. 2025
  • Starting in late fall, baby newts, that morphed from legless tadpoles with gills and fins, leave the lake and head to the hills.
    Stephanie O'Neill, NPR, 26 Jan. 2025
  • By the time the hatchlings reach the tadpole stage and are too large to eat, their fellow tadpoles lose interest.
    John Timmer, Wired, 29 Aug. 2021
  • In the desert, where tadpole ponds dry up fast, female toads sometimes have to make drastic decisions.
    Katherine J. Wu, The Atlantic, 7 July 2022
  • Kids learn to count all the way to a hundred with this 10-minute video that follows tiny tadpoles hatching in a pond.
    Marilyn La Jeunesse, Parents, 5 Aug. 2025
  • And, as a former tadpole, believe me, losing your tail is a pretty big deal, so, go Terps!
    Baltimore Sun Staff, Baltimore Sun, 23 May 2025
  • Even the immature stages, or tadpoles, of Cuban treefrogs prey on the tadpoles of native species.
    Arricca Elin Sansone, Southern Living, 8 Apr. 2025
  • Hundreds of tadpoles have been put into mountain streams to boost the population in the wild.
    John Wilkens, sandiegouniontribune.com, 17 Sep. 2017
  • What results is like a tadpole with an extra long ropey tail, and the drop part is almost unparalleled in strength.
    Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 28 Nov. 2020
  • The snot houses often are nearly transparent and flow all around the critter that looks like a tadpole, but isn’t.
    Seth Borenstein, Anchorage Daily News, 3 June 2020
  • Absorbed in a fragile trance, Allen studies a knot of tadpoles wiggling in a marshy puddle.
    Smithsonian, 29 July 2017
  • The notation was curiously quaint, dots and curly tails swimming along like so many tadpoles.
    Tim Parks, New Yorker, 11 Apr. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'tadpole.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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