A few weeks ago I brought a few tadpoles home from a puddle I found at work. Well the plan was, to just keep them long enough to show the girls how a tadpole turns into a frog. As you can imagine, this turned into the kids wanting to keep one. I returned the others back to where I found them and ended up keeping one.
He’s a Couch’s Spadefoot toad (Scaphiopus couchii) and I’ve got him setup in a plastic container with a small water dish, a couple places for him to hide and a substrate made of eco earth shredded coconut husks.
After his tail was fully reabsorbed, I started feeding him melanogaster fruit flies, and pinhead crickets dusted in some amphibian vitamins.
He’s growing well, probably doubled in size from when he first emerged from water full time. He’s probably 3/4” long, and had moved on to eating hydei fruit flies and 1 week old crickets.
My question is how many crickets/hydei fruit flies to feed him per day. So far I’ve been putting 8-10 crickets or 10-15 fruit flies per day, and this little fellow just absolutely devours them in the span of about 5 min, waits around to see if he sees any more food, then goes and soaks in his water dish.
I have no doubt that he could probably eat 2-3 times the amount of food I’m giving him per day, however most of the information I’ve found say to feed adult toads 2-3 food items every other day, and juveniles 3-4 food items per day. I’m already exceeding that recommendation by a decent amount. But then I also read that these toads can eat enough in 1 day to last them a year, or upwards of 1000 insects a day.
So I guess my question is how much should I be feeding this little fellow? Should I feed daily, or every other day? Is it even possible to overfeed a toad?
Edit: Formatting
Last edited by rhavin42; August 26th, 2018 at 10:57 PM.
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