Hi folks. Nothing but respect for the community here first off. Glad Mike turned me onto the site. I really enjoy all of your comments and sense of community when someones got a little or big problem.

I just wanted to comment on this food and get your opinions/knowledge/experience with this stuff. On another forum a person I really respect posted the following about this pa man food. The individual goes by the SN Ren and really knows his/her stuff.

Ren posted:

I personally do not see the merit in a fish-and-potato based food for an animal that eats largely invertebrates and amphibians in the wild; this is my first thought.

Breaking things down a little more: The Ca/P ratio is favorable enough, and it's a high-protein, low fat food . - which is probably why frogs can survive and grow on it. My concern lays less in "can it make a little frog get big fast?" and more "what are the long-term health implications of this diet?" I have never tried it, and I don't have any peer reviewed research on it sitting in front of me. So anything I say is going to be conjecture.

First: it is very high in ash. Ash is any inorganic material in a food - vitamins, minerals, etc. - and while it has long been debunked that the "ash" content of pet foods in and of itself is harmful, I am a little concerned that the %ash in this food is so high - especially since so few of the vitamin and mineral contents are explicitly listed. Looking at other reputable captive amphibian diets on the market, 17% just seems ridiculously high - even among other fish-based diets. Since we are given no insight into anything much outside of calcium and phosphorus, that begs the question: what is this so high in? Salt? Manganese? Fat-soluble vitamins? Can we be assured that none of the content making up this ridiculous ton of ash are ones that stress the kidneys?

We also have "fish meal" as a non-specific/unnamed animal protein. A fish is not a fish is not a fish; we already know from learning about thiaminase that some fish species have nutritional aspects directly harmful to frogs, but assuming this is accounted for by supplementation and/or outweighed by the benefit of omega 3/6 fatty acids in the diet: what kind of fish make up this mix? Bottom-feeding and predatory fish, for example, tend to accumulate heavy metals and pollutants to which frogs are very sensitive. Farm-reared fish are laden with antibiotics. Named animal protein meals are generally considered a higher quality; I would much favor "salmon meal" or "whitefish meal" so that I could at least look into the likelihood of these proteins needlessly exposing my frogs to heavy metals.

I feel like I should have something intelligent to say about the starch/seed meals in the food, but my thought comes down to: these are fillers, and why on earth would a frog need pumpkin seeds in its diet? I don't know that there's been any studies on the effects of these items to frogs, and I'm not saying that they'd be outright unsafe - more just a waste of your money paying for filler. But at end of the day: why? I don't feed my rabbits steak, I don't feed my parrots fish, and I don't feed my frogs veggies and seed. *shrugs*

Ultimately: exotic pets need specialized diets, and if it is too difficult for a person to provide life, whole foods that mimic a frog's natural diet to at least some extent? A frog isn't the right choice of pet for them. I cringe at the thought of "convenience foods" for exotics because frankly, processed pet foods for domestics don't even have a phenomenal track record wrt dietary illness and the like. Exotics nutrition research is still in its infancy, and we're putting the cart before the horse churning out diets like this before we even have a full grasp of their needs, imo.