African Clawed frog assistance

[Pippin]

Sorry all of those pictures are separate, I am not as tech savvy as I should be. Anyways that is Nosseum, my special clawed frog. Notice her left wrist (the one closest to the bottom of the two pictures. She doesn't keep her fingers taught like her other hand. Also does she seem underweight? I have always had fat clawed frogs but she is picky and doesn't get very fat (or she will after a big meal, but then won't eat for a while and gets back to that weight).

The bottom picture is of her new tank, you can see her feet behind the sword plant at the front left, and the snail in the middle of the tank. (Its hard to make out the perspective, but the snail is actually bigger than her.) Sorry the picture looks dirty, the tank was wet on the outside and bubbly on the inside from just being established. I promise it is a very clean tank.

[froggin]

Notice her left wrist (the one closest to the bottom of the two pictures. She doesn't keep her fingers taught like her other hand. Also does she seem underweight? I have always had fat clawed frogs but she is picky and doesn't get very fat (or she will after a big meal, but then won't eat for a while and gets back to that weight).

the snail in the middle of the tank.

Must be a bit hard for her to eat as they use hands when eating. As for her body shape, how old is she? My females were like that when they were young. Is there no possibility that she cannot gain weight due to some parasites? Some snails carry parasites. In the wild, frogs often have parasites and they are fine usually. But in captivity, parasites can be harmful especially when the frog's immune system is weak.

[Pippin]

She is probably about 2 now, little more little less, I can't exactly remember when I got her. But I have had her since she was a froglet so I doubt she has any parasites, I have never fed her anything that could carry them. Her only other tank mate is that snail, and I have had it forever, and its not seeping parasites into the water resident evil style...or I hope its not. (I am currently mad at it cause I awoke to find it had eaten both of my sword plants, roots, shoots and all, in one night! It ate 6 pellets of reptomin just yesterday afternoon!)

I guess I should have rephrased Noseeum's weight gain issue. She will gladly stay fat and happy off of the poor diet of frozen bloodworms and sinking shrimp pellets, but when I try to give her reptomin or anything else nutritionally beneficial she will refuse to eat it and lose weight until I give her the frozen junkfood again. I am afraid she as gotten spoiled off of the frozen cubed food, she also won't eat anything that floats. (I can't find sinking reptomin) Shes not even fond of the pelleted food right now (but I think that is because she doesn't shovel it into her mouth as well with her hurt hand) So is there anything I can entice her with that will fill the gap in her diet right now? She loves frozen cubed food, it has to sink, she will eat live things, but I think it will be difficult for her to hunt right now.


One more very distant future kind of thing, has anybody tried keeping large bamboo shrimp with clawed frogs before? They are filter feeders that clean the water, and seem too large to be eaten (at least by juveniles) and they have no interest (nor capability) of harming the frogs. I am just curious if they can live with clawed frogs, or at least if anybody has tried.

[froggin]

She will gladly stay fat and happy off of the poor diet of frozen bloodworms and sinking shrimp pellets, but when I try to give her reptomin or anything else nutritionally beneficial she will refuse to eat it and lose weight until I give her the frozen junkfood again. I am afraid she as gotten spoiled off of the frozen cubed food, she also won't eat anything that floats. (I can't find sinking reptomin) Shes not even fond of the pelleted food right now (but I think that is because she doesn't shovel it into her mouth as well with her hurt hand) So is there anything I can entice her with that will fill the gap in her diet right now? She loves frozen cubed food, it has to sink, she will eat live things, but I think it will be difficult for her to hunt right now.


One more very distant future kind of thing, has anybody tried keeping large bamboo shrimp with clawed frogs before? They are filter feeders that clean the water, and seem too large to be eaten (at least by juveniles) and they have no interest (nor capability) of harming the frogs. I am just curious if they can live with clawed frogs, or at least if anybody has tried.

I had the same issue with my ACFs before. Mine were also used to frozen bloodworms and did not show interest in Reptomin. Then I fed Hikari Tropical SINKING CARNIVORE PELLETS (that had the stronger odor than Reptomin) to them. Finally they got used to artificial diet. Since then I have fed only pellets to them. After my ACFs got used to the sinking pellets, I stopped feeding for a few days and started feeding Reptomin to them. They are now used to floating pellets such as reptomin.

As for shrimps, I keep fresh water shrimp, much smaller than bamboo shrimp, in my ACF tanks. They are filter feeder for sure. Mine are much smaller than ACFs, but since they can move quickly, they are rarely eaten by my ACFs. Also, I keep tiny (5-10mm) fresh water isopods in the tank. Isopods are so tiny they are much more efficient filter feeders than my shrimps. Since both my shrimps and isopods breed often, they never die out even if some of them are eaten by my ACFs.

[mpmistr]

I still feed my frogs reptomin by hand.. I have pennywort as a floating plant and it just gets tangled up in there.. they will swim to the top for food but they don't really stick around long enough to find anything, lol

Some of the frogs I've had took to reptomin the first day I got them, others refused to eat it but now will beg for it.

One of my frog which would literally ignore reptomin even if i put it right on top of his mouth now will go into froggy crazy attack mode when reptomin is in the tank..

[Pippin]

So basically let her go hungry and then offer the reptomin, and only that? Also I bought some marine carnivore diet cubes, the ingredients seem pretty healthy, mainly just brine and mysis shrimp, fish oil, various vitamins, some color enhancers, and spirulina, is this a good food item for the frog? And I might put a bamboo shrimp or 2 in there when the tank is more established and I have her on a better diet. I will add the ghost shrimp sooner.

P.S. what kind of shrimp do you have in your tank? And how do you keep from sucking up the isopods when cleaning/filtering the tank? I have always wanted some aquatic isopods and would be happy to exploit my new set up to benefit both Noseeum and myself.

[froggin]

P.S. what kind of shrimp do you have in your tank? And how do you keep from sucking up the isopods when cleaning/filtering the tank? I have always wanted some aquatic isopods and would be happy to exploit my new set up to benefit both Noseeum and myself.

I don't know what species my shrimps are. They were included when I bought aquatic plants. I am sure they are from Atyidae family though. Since they are translucent, they are inconspicuous in tanks. My filters suck up the isopods and I dump them when I clean the filters. (I rescue some, but it's impossible to save all of them cuz they are very tiny.) Nevertheless there are always thousands of isopods in the tank. For, lots of them dwell in the substrate that I rarely clean. Also, I do not clean all of my filters at the same time, and they survive in one of the filters. Even if they die out from my tanks, I can easily find another ones from my outdoor ponds. Thanks to my shrimps and isopods, I do not have to clean my filters so often. They are such debris eaters.