Feeding a Pacman frog in winter

[Lecroixe]

At first I looked at the squid/mussel idea and thought that it was a pretty neat idea for a winter based diet if all else fails; where I live I actually only have one place to really buy Nightcrawlers now that the closest Walmart only orders Crawlers once a month. I find that crickets are too much of a nuisance to keep and roaches are a no-go on my mother's wishes. $5 USD for 14 or so worms wasn't bad compared to $6 for 12 at the LFS that I have to go to.

Though with captive bred/domestic animals, it could be arguable that this sort of diet would be perfectly fine - I only imagine that you would need to thoroughly wash the squid/mussels prior to feeding. I understand that owning pets like this require you to "simulate" the wild in their habitat but out in the wild they would not be tong/dish trained, nor would they always have the perfect environment.

To me this idea is like applying the frog sausage diet I've been researching using lean ground beef/chicken/liver. That idea alone is unnatural because frogs don't find sausages out in the wild with protein in them lol. If the seafood is edible for humans and comes from a trustworthy source, that would mean that preparing the food is where you eliminate the bacteria aspect in the idea of feeding it to a pacman frog. "Yeah but it's food for humans, not food for pacman frogs" : Understandable, but someone has to have gone through trial and error to come back and share with the rest of the group.

[DVirginiana]

Yuri, all I can say is that your reasoning is kind of flawed...
You can't look at an animal's skeleton and decide that it looks like it would eat mussels and squid rather than crickets and roaches; a good look at the skeleton would show you that pacman frogs can't even really swim, so they definitely wouldn't be eating seafood. They do have the skeleton of a predator; a predator of insects.

I don't know enough to say that what you're doing is inherently harmful, but it's definitely nowhere near their natural diet. What you're doing may not be harmful to the frogs, but it raises a couple red flags for me... I don't know why, but I imagine you'll eventually have problems from feeding that diet.

Though with captive bred/domestic animals, it could be arguable that this sort of diet would be perfectly fine - I only imagine that you would need to thoroughly wash the squid/mussels prior to feeding. I understand that owning pets like this require you to "simulate" the wild in their habitat but out in the wild they would not be tong/dish trained, nor would they always have the perfect environment.

The thing is, they aren't domestic animals. They are wild animals living in captivity, so their wild diet should be simulated as closely as possible. It'd be like feeding a lion kitten chow because it's in a zoo. Just because something has worked for a year or so doesn't mean that it should be taken seriously. If someone says they have a pac that has lived for fifteen years eating a certain way, then I'll listen. But this seafood plan honestly doesn't sound good. The further you remove the diet from the natural whole foods they'd be getting in the wild, the more likely you're going to put something in there that doesn't belong or leave out something important IMO

Also: Nightcrawlers are very easy to breed. Get a tupperware container and fill it with dirt, keep it moist, put some food in, and put a couple containers of worms in it. In a month or two you'll have more nightcrawlers than you know what to do with!

[Lecroixe]

The thing is, they aren't domestic animals. They are wild animals living in captivity, so their wild diet should be simulated as closely as possible. It'd be like feeding a lion kitten chow because it's in a zoo. Just because something has worked for a year or so doesn't mean that it should be taken seriously. If someone says they have a pac that has lived for fifteen years eating a certain way, then I'll listen. But this seafood plan honestly doesn't sound good. The further you remove the diet from the natural whole foods they'd be getting in the wild, the more likely you're going to put something in there that doesn't belong or leave out something important IMO

Textbook definition of a wild animal is: "An animal which lives in nature (is not provided shelter by a human), is responsible for getting its own food and water (is not provided food or water by humans), and is not cared for by humans.

My Cranwelli might be a "Wild" caught frog, unsure, but now she's now a captive pet. My Fantasy Pacman is definitely a captive bred that I picked up from a breeder at a convention. While kitten chow might not be the best example for an alternative to feeding a Lion in a Zoo, you would probably experiment with other ideas if your primary source of feed is unavailable for any particular reason. But say that kitten chow could be embedded into slabs of beef that was prepared in such a fashion that they're disease/bacteria free, I would imagine that there isn't anything wrong to it. And I totally agree that the possibility of putting something unnatural into their diet is too high of a potential, but that really comes down to the owner and they're own discretion.

I did a lot of searching, probably put this project/idea on the back burner for a good month gathering other people's results and I've just actually fed my oldest one a sausage 2-3"; composed entirely of cooked & refrigerated ground beef, enriched food sticks (frog variant) and calcium supplement. I kept the ingredients list basic for this and while I didn't stuff it with aquatic frog chow, I asked myself "What makes this sausage similar to a nightcrawler?" Protein, Calcium, and maybe a little extra with the food sticks. Though I can imagine not every owner is responsible or knowledgeable enough to provide the proper nutrition when preparing an alternative diet.

Also: Nightcrawlers are very easy to breed. Get a tupperware container and fill it with dirt, keep it moist, put some food in, and put a couple containers of worms in it. In a month or two you'll have more nightcrawlers than you know what to do with!

Haha, I tried that on a much larger scale and I accidentally killed all of them by leaving the garage door open too long. I might have to try on a smaller scale. Have you tried worm farming before? My only issue is that food molds if they don't finish it in time.

[DVirginiana]

I meant wild as opposed to domesticated; like how a wolf is a 'wild' animal even if it's in captivity, but a dog is a separate domesticated species. Pacs and almost all herps in the hobby are so genetically similar to their wild counterparts that they are indistinguishable.

Again, I just try to avoid any sort of nutrient mixture or anything that isn't a whole natural food for my herps, and it's working out pretty well. I don't even really like the idea of the Samurai Pacman food, and that's actually been put together by experts. My issue with creating food items like that is that yeah, you have the same things: Protein/Minerals/Nutrients but are they in the same ratios, do they have the same fat or calcium percentage? What if beef being slightly fattier than nightcrawlers causes liver problems after three years? Those are the sort of things that you're not going to be able to get 100% right without running actual calorimetric tests on food items.

That being said, it's up to each individual keeper what to feed their frog, and a well-researched 'false' diet might end up being perfectly fine. Until I see the first batch of long-lived animals from any sort of husbandry technique I am always suspicious of it.