Quote Originally Posted by snobordnwifey View Post
Sadly, Summer the frog died today. I knew it was going to happen by the way he was acting this morning. We have a 10 gallon tank. I think I may have explained at the beginning of the thread that we got this frog as a grow-a-frog and I had no idea that it needed a bigger living environment. Once I read that, I got it into the aquarium without knowing very much about cycling the aquarium.
Sadly these "grow a frog" kits are often expensive gimmicks purchased by unsuspecting individuals and are completely inadequate. I would not feel bad about this I am sure this happens to many people.

I have a liquid test kit that I bought yesterday so I could test the water better. Before, I did use the test strips, but I got a 4 with the liquid test kit. I feel so terrible knowing that I pretty much poisoned my frog.
Test strips are very inaccurate, liquid test kids are better.. 4ppm Ammonia is incredibly toxic. I am not sure if I believe the actual NH3 was truly that high but I do believe the water did become toxic unfortunately.

The pH was also at a 6.0 when I tested it. Is that too low? I don't remember what the nitrate level was. I remember being surprised that it was so high after getting a 0 reading for nitrites. I have read about tank cycling, but I must have read some bad articles. I've just heard so many different things from different sources.
ACF can survive in pH 6, it's wild swings in pH that prove deadly. Though ACF prefer hard, basic water I don't believe the pH is what caused his death.

My daughter is in her room crying for her frog. Who knew I could care so much about a science experiment. We will definitely be letting the tank cycle before we think about getting another ACF. I feel so bad for our poor frog.
I'm sorry for your loss. I think it may be best to acquire a larger tank if you want to keep ACF, they just need larger tanks than 10 gallons. Believe it or not but for a novice keeping and maintaining larger thanks is actually easier than keeping smaller ones, there is just more room for error when you have a more voluminousness amount of water. A small tip I could give you about cycling is that using used filter media can 'jump start' a new tank and quickly cycle it, some times a local fish store (that you trust) can aid you in this, or a friends established cycled aquarium filter media can be of great use.

Good luck, don't be too discouraged. We've all made mistakes, best thing to do is educate and learn from it. I hope you do decide to keep ACF in the future, they are enjoyable pets.