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tadpole care...???

J

jenn_jeffery

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There is a mudpuddle near my house, and has a ton of tadpoles in it. The puddle tends to stay pretty much full, but I've been thinking about catching a few of the little guys to see what kind of frog they turn into.

I have a 10 gallon tank already, and at least one airpump with a stone, and can get tubing easily. I don't however have any idea of what these little guys will eat, and I know this sounds silly, but can the water be too deep? Would I need to provide any kind of hide spots for them, and should I heat the water at all?

If this is a bad idea for me to do, please don't hesitate to say so, I just thought it would be interesting to see what they are, and educational as well.

Any help is appreciated!
 
tadpoles

hi it a good ideal the water should be about 1/2 " and you can feed them fish flake and rabbit pellets .be sure to change the water ever day and only use water that be sitting out for 24 hour so all the gases are removed bruce if you have any question let me know
 
There used to be a large low spot at work that collected the rains in the spring. The frogs would lay tons of eggs in it, but most years it would dry up before the tadpoles could leave the water.
Fow a few years I would dip out 1-200 tadpoles and let them morph at home, then take them back for release.

I usually used 10 gallon tanks with an inch and a half of water. I just kept them sitting in the herp room and never heated the water, or used an airstone. The water needed to be changed every 1-2 days, and as was mentioned in the other post, I used aged water even though I use a well.
I fed them primarily algae wafers and pieces of bread. I normally got a 90% or so survival rate.

Once the back legs appear I'd add gravel or rocks to the tank to give them a place to crawl out on. They'd have a little of their tail left when they left the water and wouldn't do much of anything for another day or two until it was fully absorbed.
Different species take different times to complete the metamorphosis. Depending on how old the tadpoles were when I collected them it usually took from 30 to 60 days for them to become frogs.
I once caught half a dozen bullfrog tadpoles from the river and after a year only one had changed into a froglet. I finally released them into a creek. That species spends a long time as a tadpole.
 
Different species of frog produce tadpoles with different requirements...

The majority are pretty oppurtunistic about food, taking algae and vegitation if there's nothing meatier avaliable but some are strictly carnivorous and many of those are also cannibalistic given half a chance to get hungry so...

Many species also tend to do better in water with a certain chemical makeup- temperature, light cycle and abundance of rain are often breeding triggers for the adults, rainwater is generally not chemically identical to standing water and fresh rainfall will change the acidity and hardness of existing water. Of course, there's also a huge difference between water found in most moving bodies versus verbal ponds or mudsinks.

Often it's safe to wait until you start to notice leg development before dropping the water level and offering land, but here again there is variety. Some species metamorphasize faster than others and in many species, temperature, light cycle, avaliability of food, depth and chemical composition of the water are all triggers for leg development. Add in the way some species encourage individual development... And the biggest tadpole or the one closest to changing will release hormones into the water which slow the growth rate of other frogs/toads of the same species- meaning the most successful continues to be the most successful and have the greatest individual chance of passing those genes along... And you'll sometimes get a tank full of tadpoles which change one at a time unless you split them up.

So... species identification helps a lot with survival rate but some species would survive and flourish in just about anything.
 
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