--- title: Life cycles and metamorphosis: frog, butterfly, ladybird — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Life cycles and metamorphosis: frog, butterfly, ladybird», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Many animals change shape completely as they grow up: a tadpole becomes a frog, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Life cycles and metamorphosis: frog, b… # Life cycles and metamorphosis: frog, butterfly, ladybird Lesson 48 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 13 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/0/) — Many animals change shape completely as they grow up: a tadpole becomes a frog, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and this big change of body is called metamorphosis. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/1/) — Visit a garden pond in early spring and you may find a clump of frogspawn with hundreds of black dots; by summer some of them are froglets the size of your fingernail climbing out onto the grass. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/3/) — Cartoons show a caterpillar munching for a week, then popping out as a butterfly with a ribbon, and a ladybird with one spot for every birthday; real life cycles take longer, and spots never count years. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/4/) — A female common frog lays about 1,000 to 2,000 eggs in a jelly clump, and because most eggs and tadpoles are eaten, often only a handful become adult frogs; toads lay their eggs in long strings instead. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/5/) — Tadpoles hatch after about 1 to 3 weeks, breathe with gills and swim with a tail, and grow faster in warmer water. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/6/) — A tadpole grows back legs first, then front legs; its gills are replaced by lungs, and its tail is not dropped but slowly taken apart and reused by the body. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/7/) — About 12 to 16 weeks after the eggs were laid, tiny froglets leave the water; they take two or three years to become adult frogs and can also breathe through their damp skin. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/8/) — A butterfly has four stages, egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and adult; peacock and red admiral butterflies lay eggs on nettles, the food their caterpillars eat, and a caterpillar moults about 4 or 5 times as it grows. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/9/) — Inside the chrysalis most of the caterpillar breaks down into a soup, and groups of cells waiting since it hatched build wings, legs, eyes and antennae from it. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/10/) — A new butterfly pumps fluid into its crumpled wings until they open and dry; the red drop below it is meconium, leftover waste, not blood. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/11/) — Monarch butterflies from Canada and the USA fly up to about 4,000 km to a few mountain forests in Mexico for the winter, and the trip back north takes several generations; a first-timer finds the way with the Sun and an inner clock, though it has never been there. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/13/) — A ladybird's spots show its kind, not its age: a seven-spot ladybird always has about 7 spots, and the bright colours warn birds that it tastes bad. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/48-life-cycles-metamorphosis/14/) — Mayflies live a year or more as nymphs under water, but adults live only a few hours to a day or two and have no working mouth: an adult only mates and lays eggs. - ← previous: [Who eats whom: predators, prey, scavengers and decomposers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/47-predators-prey-scavengers-decomposers/) - next →: [Babies: eggs, live birth, pouches and parents](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/49-babies/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)