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Thread: Emergency-care help with emaciated wild Cuban Tree Frog?

  1. #1
    Kathryn Dorn
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    Default Emergency-care help with emaciated wild Cuban Tree Frog?

    Hello, everyone -
    I'm attempting to rescue an extremely emaciated Cuban Tree Frog whom I found in my backyard earlier today, and if anyone has any advice for giving nutritional support to an underweight frog, I'd be very grateful!
    When I found him/her, he/she was sitting very still with half-closed eyes in the grass and barely moved when I nudged him/her with my foot (the frog is about two or three inches long, so I don't have any idea whether this is a large male or a smallish female - I'm going to use "it" as a pronoun from now on, just to be succinct). Its eyes are perfectly bright and clear and I can't see any obvious infections or injuries, but the end of its spine and its shoulderblades are sticking up out of its back and its arms and legs are very thin, and it only has enough energy for one small leap every few minutes. (I'm in Tampa, Florida, and when I found it outside, the air temperature was probably in the mid-70s Fahrenheit - on the cool side for a Florida frog, but definitely not cold enough for this kind of lethargy.)
    I did some very panicked and fast Internet searching, ran out and bought some Pedialyte and ground-turkey baby food, and soaked the frog in a 10%-Pedialyte, 90%-filtered-water bath for about fifteen minutes. The frog became slightly more active and climbed around the edges of the bath. Then I took the frog out of the bath and used a thin piece of cardboard to open its mouth and put a small glob of the ground-turkey baby food in its mouth (after about fifteen more minutes of carefully trying to open the frog's mouth while the frog pushed the piece of cardboard away with its front paws, which is one of the reasons why I'm so worried about this frog - I had to force-feed cat food to one of my toads in a similar way when he wouldn't eat for a long time, but he always tried to squirm away, and I don't think I've ever met a healthy wild frog that wouldn't just try to escape if I pushed a piece of cardboard at its face). I don't know if that was a good idea or not, but I didn't want to try to start the frog on solid food (e.g., crickets/waxworms) if it hadn't eaten in a long time. The frog is currently in a small Tupperware-style container with holes in the lid and a paper towel soaked in filtered water for hydration, and if he/she is alive tomorrow, I'm planning to buy waxworms and offer them to him/her - does anyone have any better recommendations, please??? If the tree frog won't hunt for live worms, should I keep soaking it in Pedialyte and/or trying to force-feed it ground-turkey baby food, or would something else be better? (I was running through the store in complete panic and grabbed the ground turkey because it had fewer non-meat ingredients than the canned cat food, and my family's bearded dragon has eaten ground-turkey baby food with no ill effects when he wouldn't eat insects, but I have no idea if turkey is safe for frogs to eat.)
    My eventual goal is to give the frog enough calories to regain its strength so I can release it into my yard again (assuming that its main problem is simply that it's underweight, and that it doesn't have other medical issues to deal with), but my short-term goal is giving the frog calories in a way that won't traumatize it, poison it, or give it refeeding syndrome...if anyone has ideas, please help!

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