Bufo boreas (Western toad) at Mystic Lake

There are many less tadpoles then when I visited here a month before , just a few visible. Given the ice we saw in Moraine Park, there isn't a lot of time left for these toads to reproduce. THis lake is a elevatio of aboout 1800m. (6000 ft.)

Update 20 January 2012
I will guess these are Bufo boreas (Western toad) tadpoles which
"The tadpole is uniformly dark and appears black in water. Varying degrees of fine lighter flecking are present on the body. The body is dorsally flattened with a low tail fin that originates at the dorsal tail-body junction. .... Tadpoles grow to approximately 5.0 cm total length (2 in.). The tadpoles form dense aggregations or “schools” composed of thousands of individuals that consist of kin groups (sibs from the same clutch)."
Source www1.dnr.wa.gov/nhp/refdesk/herp/html/4bubo.html

"Bufo boreas was rare in MORA lentic surveys. Toad observations consisted of individual
adults at three different survey sites and a large aggregation of tadpoles in Mystic Lake."
fresc.usgs.gov/products/papers/fr-mtrainier-amphib.pdf

As an aside - I figured this out in 2012, for photos I took in 2003, a bit of a delay. I will have to get up to Mystic lake this summer and see if there are still lots of tadpoles there.

DSCN6234a