Trying a "Natural Selection" Breeding Method

[Jenste]

Most of you are familiar with me and my breeding experiences of the past - I have raised numerous spawns of African Clawed Frogs and Axolotls with little trouble. I have always removed the eggs to their own set up away from the parents and have had healthy offspring. For some reason, I can not get my Fire Belly Toad spawns to live more than a few weeks in their own tank.



From my reading and chatting with other FBT owners/breeders, the tads do best in well established, "old" systems with a large supply of algae to feed off of. So I am trying a new method. My 72 gallon bow front FBT paludarium has about 25 gallons of water about 8-10 inches deep depending on which area you look at. I have a few 3 week old guppy fry and 5 neon tetras in here (had more but these survived the quarantine, the others didn't and I haven't replaced them yet.) I have the water area "heavily" planted, or should I say thickly planted with a very low tech system. Numerous bunches of amazon sword, floating water wisteria and cambomba plants fill most of the water area. It makes it look pond-ish which seems to make the guppy fry, neons, and FBTs happy.



The FBTs mate nearly every day due to the fact that there are quite a few of them - I find new eggs constantly. Rather than moving the eggs I am leaving them in the tank to see which ones survive. I have tadpoles and eggs of all ages and stages of development now. Some are nearly three weeks old, some are about 3 hours old from this mornings mating that I saw on my way out the door. I am going to try leaving the tadpoles to fend for themselves amongst the plants and so far it seems to be working. The older tadpoles I have seen are larger than any tadpoles I have tried raising in their own tank. I will remove the larger tadpoles if I see any get to the point where they are close to completing their morphing/absorbing their tails because at this point they will be mostly land dependent for a few months.



Let's see if this works!

[Ajuki]

Good luck! Your tank sounds awesome! I hope to see the little guys that make it!

[Jenste]

Pictures of the tank, full tank shot.


Oldest tadpoles - about 2.5-3 weeks old


About 1.5-2 weeks old


About 4 days old


About 1-2 day old eggs

[Mentat]

Very nice tank Jen! Like the tads pics, you can see great detail of their bodies . Think this idea could work better for you.

When you moved your tads to their tank in the past, was that tank water all from the breeding tank or different? Thank you !

[Jenste]

I've done fresh /new water, parents water, and mixtures lol.

[Ajuki]

Such great detail in the photos!! Thanks for sharing!

[Mentat]

I've done fresh /new water, parents water, and mixtures lol.

Haven't bred frogs yet; but my experience with fish is never to move eggs, unless you keep them covered in water and the water in new tank is moved 100% from the tank they were in. Because of that it's a lot easier to move parents or raise fry with parents.

If you still have the guppies and tetras in tank and the tads fit in their mouths, you will loose tads to fish too .