Uh Oh. Gonna have babies

[daybr4ke]

Wow. In my area it's usually 6 or so dollars. Still, if you have have excess you can offer them on Craigslist for a couple bucks each and still make a bit of money, but it's probably not worth it lol

[alane]

I started feeding them nightcrawlers. I have to cut the worm into pieces. The first feeding was hilarious:

I put the worm in the middle of the tank. All five adults came up to look at it. None would eat. They were all daring each other to go first.
Eventually one ate it, tentatively.

Now, I find that one of my adults simply does not like worms. Three of them will eat them willingly. One of them goes absolutely nuts for worms and will snap excitedly and randomly whenever one comes near. A good worm meal makes 'em go catatonic in the sense that they'll just stare at space blankly nomatter what you do.

I try to feed the adults worms first before I throw in the crickets. The small crickets are supposed to be for the toadlets.

A really short worm segment can be swallowed by a toadlet. However, not all at once. And this typically results in two frogs struggling to eat the same worm. If two frogs get the same worm, they do anything they can to wrench the worm out of the other frogs mouth. they both start flailing wildly. poor worm.

[daybr4ke]

Wow, brutal!
Interesting to find out about the one toad not liking worms. Everybody has preferences, right?

[alane]

The bottom of my tank has a population of cherry shrimp. about the time i had a ton of tadpoles, my intake filter (some filter material simply wrapped around the intake) clogged due to all of the food going into the tank, so I removed it.

Many weeks later, I noticed that there were zero shrimp babies.

I put an intake filter back on two weeks ago.

And today, the number of tiny baby shrimp is... countless... good lord they are everywhere.

the intake filter is an important thing as far as not sucking up all of the baby shrimp.

sweet. this is an intensely effective cleanup crew. I dropped a worm fragment the other day, went to the bottom. The assassin snails and the cherry shrimp loved it. gone in hours.

the shrimp are interesting to watch, they 'fly' around everywhere and land on any surface and pick at it. The females have so many eggs in their clutch that they end up spending their time juggling eggs. a few too many to just grab at once, they sort of constantly lose a few and grab em back.

[alane]

Ok, well, i'm going to make a confession. I feel that some folks will take this poorly, but I feel I should share anyway.

It is common knowledge that Fire Belly Toads are poisonous, mildly so.

It's common knowledge that PacMan frogs will readily eat another frog.

I had a tank with a hundred FBTs.

I reasoned this way: Perhaps the FBTs do not develop their poison until they grow up.

So.... (you can see where this is going)


On a day where Doug, the Pacman frog was hungry, i put some toadlets in a container next to him. He wanted them.

So, I gave him the smallest. He ate 'em up, no problem. NOM! Doug the Pacman will eat two at a time.

Well, the next week I fed Doug, and being wary of the poison toadlets, I gave him a toadlet that was four weeks old. Not a freshly hatched one.

And.... (i'm not proud of this by the way)

Bubbles. Bubbles came out of my Pacman frog's nose after he ate it.

Ugh. Oops. That was the end of that experiment.

This was many many months ago, my Pacman frog is still growing like a weed. That incident did not seem to cause lasting damage.

And I still got a tank of FBTs, but more like 30 and not 100.

I am going with nightcrawlers right now for both species of frog (and small crickets for the FBT toadlets). This sort of food fattens them up good.

[daybr4ke]

Real talk, I understand how people could find this outrageous or offensive, but I understand. My Woodhouse's Toads would stare and even lunge at the side of the tank while their enclosure was situated next to that of my Pacific Treefrogs. I considered offering them(and my pacman) some tadpoles or young frogs, since I had/have so many. While in the end I decided not to, for multiple reasons, it's not unreasonable in my opinion. Pacman frogs regularly eat other frogs in the wild, anyway. The major arguments against it are usually passing on parisites(Shouldn't be an issue with your captive bred toads, anyway.), the moral dilemma of feeding a frog to another frog, and possible toxins. Personally, I think what you did isn't too big a deal. I even caught an adult Pacific Treefrog chowing down on a baby one once, and had to seperate them, which kinda changed my views on frogs eating eachother. Also, I've no experience with FBTs, but I have(accidentally) kept a Rough skinned or California newt larvae, for a short period of time. Both species are HIGHLY neurotoxic, but after some checking I found out the larvae are not poisonous, and that they only begin producing toxins after metamorphosis.(These newts were returned to their original habitat soon after, just for the record. I wasn't comfortable with them in my house.) While not really similar species, it's possible they are the same in terms of toxin production. Oh, and I'm glad Doug is fine.

[alane]

Well, my babies are still slowly growing. We went through a pretty awful heat wave, temps were over 107F. I don't really know, as I fled to the coast...i'm not going to stew in that heat if I can help it...and the chiller on my aquarium kept my frog colony alive and healthy at 72F. My PacMan frog can take the heat easily it seems, I figured as much as he's a tropical kind of frog.

The FBT tank has been a regulated 72F for some time now and my frogs, who used to sing all the time, have stopped entirely. Dead quiet. They otherwise appear happy, healthy and hungry.

It's interesting that I do, quite often, see an adult frog get a small frog in its mouth. But these frogs seem to have no teeth at all, and every time it has happened, the little frog gets gummed for a while and then spit out. I've not seen any toadlets that have been harmed by this. Although occasionally the toadlet is so irritated from being swallowed by an adult that they go on a very fast swim, back and forth the length of the tank about three times before settling down. No missing legs detected so far. The one time one 'bit' my finger, i hardly felt a thing.
And yet, with crickets, these frogs are quick, accurate and deadly.