i have fire belly toads in a 40gal tank. I've been hearing the mating calls for weeks & today was happy to finally see eggs that were laid. i carefully moved the eggs to a separate temporary travel style tank (roughly 1 gallon in size) i am very excited to watch this process & share it with my kids. any advice?!
Depending on the numbers you have I suggest you leave a couple in the original tank with the adults. I found it very interesting to observe the differences in growth rate and appearance between different groups that where raised in different environments.
A short guide:
The eggs will hatch very quickly, within a couple of days. In the first days the tadpoles will remain still and won't eat; they are still absorbing the nutritions from their egg yolk. Once they start to swim around they will need to be fed, this is usually in a couple days. I have tried about any type of food mentioned on the internet but have found that the tadpoles themselves like spinach the best, they go crazy for it! Boil it for about 10 min and than just store it in the freezer in small portions. Other food suggestions are: kale or actually any type of greens (boiled), spirulina powder, algae wafers, blood worms, daphnia, tubifex and tropical fish flakes. They are omnivorous but can bee raised solely on greens. You could cover the spinach with spirulina powder for the proteins and they won't really need anything else. In about a month they will crawl onto land and a whole new chapter begins!
You have to find the right balance for water changes; not too often but of course also not too little. All tough it is advised on some forums to do complete water changes I strongly advice against it for the same reason people also don't clean their aquariums like that; you remove all bacterial cultures that keep the environment in balance. So instead just 50% water changes or something in these numbers.
You can choose to raise all tadpoles together in one tank or in small groups in several smaller containers. Both would have their advantages and disadvantages I would say so I guess it's up to you to decide what you prefer. There's no real limit as to how many tadpoles you could house together but in my experience they will grow a bit bigger when there is more space. Also you will have to do less frequent water changes of course.
A great tip I read somewhere:
You can use a turkey baster to suck out any feces from the bottom!
I had one female frog this year lay a few clutches of eggs. the tadpoles were able to eat a 5 pound box of spinach. you don't have to boil it for a full 10 minutes, just boil until it wilts.
then serve forth.
i boiled my spinach as needed, just a handful of leaves once they had finished the last handful.
another vote on spinach being the best food for them...they seemed to like that food the best, by far.
once they emerge, i fed them fruit flies. i ordered my initial fly colonies from Josh's frogs and every week would start new colonies. Takes about three weeks for them to hatch out.
it is not long before they can eat small crickets.
i kept tadpoles in both a separate tank as well as the adult aquarium and in my case, the tadpoles in the adult aquarium fared better than the ones I separated. The tadpoles in the adult tank spent a lot of time eating slime and algae as well as spinach, I believe that makes a difference.
five pounds of spinach put some awful stuff into my tank filters. it was green, yes, but it did NOT smell like spinach. *yuck*
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