I'm another who just came to this forum after joining it a year or more ago and not getting replies much haven't been on since. Also been too busy in general, but I'm glad to have stumbled upon this thread.

Since 2009 I've been helping the local Gray community thrive with my pool as their yearly spawning ground.
I'd have gladly tried to answer your many good questions if I'd found your posts earlier.

Anyway nice to find others who actually care for these cute, sticky little gremlins.

Starting in 2015 I began to get a lot more technical in my efforts to make the property increasingly welcoming for the 2 Toad specs and the Gray and Wood Frogs who use the pool cover spring pond for spawning. Before I take the cover off I get all the tadpoles off and enough leaves that fall onto it the previous fall as I can and set them up in what I call "nursery pods" with the same water they hatched in on the pool cover. In 2016 I started counting every single froglet that crawled out of the water of the pods and distributing them around the 1.75 acre plot. I counted 3,500 Micro-toads (toadlets) of the American and Fowlers Toads and stopped counting after that. That count didn't include all the ones that crawled off the cover before and after I started gathering them up to prvent the huge die off from the blisteringly hot pool cover plastic. After that period the cover came off and that year I accounted for 109 Gray Tree Froglets.

I had no intention at all of harboring any of them when I started and I stuck to that until I found one with a badly deformed leg that couldn't jump well at all and would have been a snack right out of the chute. So I kept that one and that's the first one I raised. He only stayed for 2 years and one night in his second spring he was playing in the pool cover pond with his relatives and he was taken by an owl!

There's more to that story and I went one year without domesticating any but their numbers have increased dramatically each year since I started keeping track of them.
Seven adults and a few "Junior Mints" as I call the pint-sized ones that stick around past morphing maintain residence on the house with another dozen or so adults in the trees and shrubs around the pool. During the spring spawns they're joined by at least another dozen who come from farther trees and shrubs probably within 100 yards or so.

Last year I found 4 with malformations, one of which was also very anemically colored and unusually small. I domesticated all 4.

To house them I started with all 4 in a 5.5 gal. tank and fed them fruitflies. Then they moved into a 10 gal., then into a 55 gal., then I put the 2 bucks in a 75 gal. and the 2 does stayed in the 55. They eventually all ended up in the 75 gal. tank where they are now and seem pretty happy. One of the does is completely dominant to one buck and her and the other buck are in a power struggle as I type this. The smallest one's the other doe and she's so deformed she can't climb like the others so she stays in her own level of the tank and the others each seem to visit her, and snuggle with her but never act in any competitive manner toward her, they seem like they're concerned for her and she seems to appreciate their company in demonstrable ways. She lightens her color when she gets a visit from them.

OK, I've rambled on enough. Good to read your accounts and hope to read more from you and other Gray Tree Frog people here.
I have a few videos of the frog and toad community on my property in this playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...8f46gZXD7Bq3FD