[Encyclia]

If it was me, I would give it more time before making a decision. I have seen that level of kink in the tail before. Gotta wait till the tail disappears to see what's up, maybe longer. If it makes you feel any better, he is in no distress due to difficulty in feeding because the majority of this energy is coming from the tail at this point, I believe.

On a different front, I again confess my ignorance of tree frogs, but when front legs pop in my dart frogs, I get them out of deep water. The only times I have seen kinked tails like in your pics are when I was late in getting the frogs out of the water (maybe he is absorbing the tail too fast due to energy consumed by having to tread water all the time? no idea). In darts, when the front legs pop, the gills are about gone and replaced with lungs. Darts will drown if left in deep water too long. I always move my guys to a tilted grow-out when the front legs emerge. Please check that with a different source to make sure that's true of your little guys, too, though.

Mark

 

[makesha]

Thanks, Mark, I'll follow your recommendation, including double checking with the research

 

[makesha]

I made the water very shallow and tilted the container up on one side, in addition to having sticks in there and some stones to climb up on to get out. Normally the frog would be out of the water at this stage. I think the back right leg is so bad the baby can't get out. It's able to get its head out of the water to breathe at least.

http://imgur.com/gallery/zIXJLjN

 

[makesha]

Poor baby Noodle didn't seem to have any fight left and as the tail was nearly absorbed things didn't seem to be getting better with the right leg. Worse, I noticed the right arm seemed always turned under in the past day, when he's seemed to just have lost all strength. I took the baby out and had a look and the right arm didn't seem good. The baby has been a very dark color all this time which I've read might mean stress. It didn't seem likely the little one was going to improve but it certainly seemed to be suffering. I've just put it out of its misery. Thanks to everybody for the support and I hope this thread is helpful to somebody else in the future if nothing else.
Good news is bendy tail number one is doing well https://www.instagram.com/p/CEzV_VKp4QG/?igshid=nvx6ub1ca4wd

 

[azandis]

I've raised thousands of eggs through metamorphosis in research contexts and see kinked tails fairly regularly. I most commonly see this associated with water quality problems, especially salinity and acidity (hot water with a bunch of respiring tadpoles can turn water acidic pretty quickly). It would be hard to know what the water was like in the kiddy pool you pulled your tads from, but that would be my first thought.

As you found with your little friend, tail morphology in itself has almost no correlation with eventual skeletal morphology. That's because there is no skeletal structure associated with the larval tail. The straight structure of the tail is a result of the notochord development and lateral muscles which develops long before the skeleton ossifies. Of all the curvy tadpoles I've seen in my lab, pretty much all of them metamorph with no persistent problems.