Uh Oh. Gonna have babies

[alane]

well, i'm being lazy on the photos. i need to spend some time to clean up the glass on my tank. good lord my water is hard.

My frogs lay eggs about every week. But the last few months, all eggs have been sterile. i do not know why. could be the high temperatures i had before the chiller was added. could be a toxin i cannot detect with my test kit. could be a sterile frog.

i was concerned that there was a water quality issue even though a basic test kit showed no problems.
in response to the dead eggs i've been getting, I added some activated charcoal and some "de-nitrate" to my filter.

one week later...i have live eggs...i expect to get some 'clinger' tadpoles this evening as they hatch out. my tank has developed enough algae that i suspect they will have plenty to eat and i look forward to getting the algae cleaned up in a natural manner.

I do not know whether or not there was a water quality issue. A frog was either shooting blanks, or I had something in the water that did not show up on the test kit...and was removed by the activated charcoal.

either way, i'm down to about 30 froggies. most of them are originals from the first batch of eggs. they are 1/3rd the size of the adults and would probably develop faster if I fed them at a maximum rate. many of the latter and smaller toadlets didn't get fed enough and they started to die off. if i had fed them all, i'd be at over 100 toadlets. there's a population of cherry shrimp on the bottom of this tank that'll eat a dead froglet in one day.

there is a balance between water quality and how much food i throw into this tank. so i don't max out the food. wish i could save them all, but then i'd be up to my eyeballs in toadlets and would be branded, rightfully so, a crazy frog person.