Today I come home to check my FBT tank. Everyone's happy. But I see something i've never seen before.
It looks like it's a frog poop. However, it's the wrong color. It's bright orange.
Huh?!?
I have attached a photo. The bright orange spots you see are what happens when Repashy Calcium Plus vitamin powder gets wet.
All other poops seen in this environment have been totally normal.
What on earth?!?
Interesting, what color is it when it goes in? I never seen or used repashy. However I don't think it's abnormal for the color to change based on what's eaten.
When I feed my crickets a lot of spinach, their poop is a bright emerald green. And let's not talk about grape koolaid when I was a kid and drank a lot of that........... <<grin>>
Well, i've always dusted with this kind of vitamin powder. It is white. But if you get it wet, in a few hours, some bits of it turn orange.
Typically, their poo is light beige, maybe a darker shade. Never seen one colored like this.
Dusted crickets are their sole diet. Once I get a source of feeder earth worms, i'll feed them that as well (worms are more fun anyway)
Sometimes I feed crickets when the cricket is "not long for this world". I wonder if a sick cricket could cause a funny colored poop.
I guess i'll have to keep an eye out for any unusual behavior, but all six of my FBTs seem to be okay.
Certainly it should be an indication to pay a little closer attention, but probably just like outlier data, it's not an issue.
I think you've already been involved in some posts that mention it, but just to be sure, many suggest not to feed them "red wrigglers". They say that that type of earthworm excretes a very bad tasting slime that might cause your FBT's to shun all types of earthworms.
I did some searching and found this about Red Wrigglers versus Nightcrawlers:
http://www.gartersnake.info/articles...htcrawlers.php
I did more searching and found a fellow that grows worms in my local area:
http://www.thewormdude.com/products-page/
If you have a place to make a small compost pile, there are already plenty of worms in your own yard. Just need to give them a reason to have a population explosion.
There are both red wigglers and night crawlers in mine. They are easy to distinguish from each other.
One more weird poop in the tank today, half orange and half normal.
So i'm gonna chalk that up to a Weird Cricket.
I did obtain some nightcrawlers, so tonight my frogs will get a new treat.
Maybe a few of them had an excess of dusting powder on them.
"Excess powder".
This may be the case. The color matches.
One of my frogs does not really like this powder. So when he strikes at a cricket, he'll often let it go. He'll end up getting a mouth full of powder though.
I felt so sorry for him after so many mouthfuls of powder, I gave him an undusted cricket. Dropped it next to it's head. It lasted 0.05 seconds before it was swallowed.
I find that not all of my frogs love night crawler worms. But one of them is a fiend for them and will stuff himself alarmingly with them.
Repashy Calcium Plus has instructions which say "dust with every feeding". But since it turned one of my frogs poop orange, i'm thinking that some of the more eager frogs are getting way more vitamin powder than they need.
I've recently introduced night crawler worms to their diet. I cut the tails off of the worms and feed 'em as big a section as they can easily manage. Some of 'em will eat the worms. One of them likes worms. But most of these frogs are movement triggered...they will go out of their way to do acrobatic jumping for a cricket.
I introduced a few cherry shrimp to my tank and so far, they appear to thrive. I wrapped my intake with filter media. That media has become loaded with all sorts of stuff that these shrimp like to graze on.
The mosquito fish are still around and they don't harass the shrimp.
If I hadn't gone out of my way to kill lots of snails, then my tank would have many hundreds of snail babies from the Elodea I bought at PetSmart. But by killing every snail and egg-sac I see, i've been able to keep their numbers very low.
And I added a small satellite tank attached to the main one via a siphon and a low flow pump. This gives me about 4 more gallons of water volume (11 gal to 15 gal) and also allows me to grow more vegetation to help clean up the water. I'm sure it'll come in useful as a sort of quarantine tank.
I'm looking at all of this and realizing to myself: This is not earthquake safe. This is going to be a disaster some day.
How do people make their aquariums earthquake safe?
We use the Repashy calcium plus 2 days a week, Mondays and Fridays. We dust with Repcal calcium with vitamin D3 Tuesday's, Thursday's, and Saturday's. Wednesday's and Sunday's are non-dusting days.
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I dust with repashy calcium plus lightly every feeding. My frogs dont eat a ton so I usually dont have a lot of poo... Now I understand what those little orange dots are from. The supplement I didnt know that
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