Raising ACF tadpoles

[Jenste]

Hi Gemma!

With the airline I do a two handed approach when the tads are really little. I use one hand to hold and guide the airline tubing along the bottom of the tank and the other hand to "shoo" away the tads. I have the airline empty out into a bucket and this is where the turkey baster really comes in handy - - any tads who end up going for a ride are easy to suck up from the bucket and put back into the tank. I never removed the tads during water changes. If they are hovering in one spot that I really want to siphon I tap gently a few times in the area and they swim to the opposite side of the tank.

If your air pump is too powerful then put a knot in the airline. You can loosen/tighten it as needed until you have a flow you are comfortable with. You can also disperse the flow a bit by putting on a spliter as if you were going to attach multiple airlines, they can either be used to run multiple tanks at once or simply left open to release some of the air pressure.

[Gemma]

Thanks Jen. I'll try that tomorrow when I change the water again, and I'll buy a turkey baster asap. The buckets that I empty the water into when I'm doing water changes are black so it's hard to see if I've sucked any tadpoles up. I'm going to have to buy a white one I think. If tying a knot in the pump's airline doesn't work I'll cut a little hole in it until I can get a splitter.

There's something wrong with one of my tadpoles I just noticed him lying on his side on the bottom. I thought he was dead, but then he tried swimming up to the top. He keeps sinking back to the bottom every time he tries to swim. He can't stay in the middle of the water at all. What could be wrong? He wasn't like this earlier because I had all of the free-swimming tadpoles in a bowl and none of them were resting on the surface. He looks about the same size as the one I sucked up, so I'm wondering if it's the same tadpole and I've hurt him, or if it's more likely to be something else?

[Jenste]

Could be dietary problems, water changing problems, ammonia levels, genetic deficiency ....who knows. Roughly 60% of tadpoles actually make it to frog stage. The rest die off from any number of problems.

[Gemma]

He died, and there's another one doing the same thing but this one keeps getting up and trying again every time he sinks The rest seem fine though. I think it might be because I stressed them out by chasing them around the tank with a cup earlier when I changed their water. It took me an hour to catch all the tadpoles so by the time I was ready to put them back in their tank, the water in the bowl they were in was cold (my house is freezing), and their tank water was 25 degrees, so that must have stressed them too. I won't be doing that again. I'll test the water in the morning (it's 3am here) as well to make sure that's OK.

I managed to reduce the flow of the air pump, by the way. I cut loads of tiny holes in the airline.

I also counted the tadpoles earlier since I was removing them one by one to change the water. I had exactly 80, but 79 now since one died. I'm definitely going to need to buy that bigger plastic tub!

[Gemma]

I still can't do these water changes without sucking tadpoles up, and my gravel vacuum has grids and bits of plastic on the inside that could easily kill a tadpole. I was being as careful as I could possibly be, had a friend on tadpole watch and still sucked one up within the first 30 seconds. I had to give up and try to scoop some of the stuff off the bottom out with a cup instead. It might be easier when I get a larger tub (hopefully this weekend) but right now I really don't think it's possible to use a gravel vacuum in there. I don't know I'm going to keep the tank clean.

[Gemma]

For anyone struggling to vacuum the bottom of the tank without sucking tadpoles up, I've found a solution. It takes a bit longer, but it's worth it.

I got a long a piece of standard-width airline tubing (the stuff you use for air pumps/airstones, etc) and created a vacuum with it. To do this, I took the pipe to the bathroom and held one end under the running tap. I waited until there was a steady flow of water coming out of the other end, then I put my thumb over the end with the water coming out of it and kept water running into the opposite end until all the air bubbles had gone from inside the pipe. I then blocked this end with my thumb too and brought the pipe back to the tank, still blocking both ends with my thumbs. I held one end of the pipe in the bucket below the tadpole tank and the other end in the tank, and released both of my thumbs to create a steady flow of water coming from the tank.

I managed to clean the bottom of the tank thoroughly and avoid hurting any tadpoles! Because the water comes out much slower, even if the tadpoles swum close to the tube, they didn't get sucked up. The larger tadpoles probably wouldn't even fit in the tube, and even if the smaller ones did get sucked up they'd have a much smoother ride than being forced through the grids and bumpy plastic of the gravel vacuum at high speeds. After cleaning the bottom, I just used a cup to get out the rest of the water that I wanted to remove.

[Gemma]

I love seeing how much the tadpoles grow and change every day The smallest ones which hatched a few days ago all started free-swimming today. They're tiny and it's hard to imagine that the largest ones were exactly the same size as them just under a week ago. The larger ones are getting little barbs starting to emerge. I can see their little hearts beating inside them, and they're getting more pigments on their backs. I have 81 tadpoles now (I found 2 newly hatched ones hanging around in the tank with their father a couple of days ago) and no more have died Most of them hatched a week ago today. I can't wait to see how much they will have changed by this time next week!