The REAL Frog Thread

I learned something new today from this thread. I never knew frogs would eat mammals. 👍

Well get this. I am about to shower up and go to bed. But before I did I went out to go catch a frog for my pacman to eat. Got her a green treefrog and came in to feed her.

And just like that, I found her dead.

So I’m now 0 for 3. A few months ago I was talking to a petstore owner that found she has to raise several pacmans to get one that survives long-term. I think captive breeding has ruined their genetics.

If I try again, I may raise the next one the old fashioned way and raise it in shallow water instead of substrate. That’s how pacmans were raised in the 80s.

Sorry about that.

Its possible. But, I view them like my chickens. If they can’t handle microbes or parasites,they’re too weak.

My first pacman frog was a tank. It lived for 10 years and I fed it whatever I wanted from the wild. It was likely wild-caught.

Every single pacman frog I’ve owned since was probably captive bred and did not live more than a year. And I kept those by the book. While the first one lived in a bowl of water and gravel. Most received only food from the pet store. Only these last 3 got wild amphibians. All the others got petstore crickets and mice and they all died the same. Spread out over 20 years.

The common denominator overall wasn’t whether I fed wild amphibians to them, but was that they were captive bred and I followed care guides.

I can’t help them being captive bred. I think they all are these days. But I’m throwing out the care guide. I’ve decided that I’m going to try again with 2. One is going to live in a pool of gravel water. The other is going to live in a mature, humid, plant terrarium. I want to see which one does best.

I hadn’t changed the dirt in this one’s terrarium in several months. I didn’t want to disturb the plants. Someone once told me that neglecting to change their dirt often will cause them to suddenly die when the waste content of the dirt gets to a certain point. The only I kept it water got his bowl washed regularly.

I have a friend that grew great tomatoes in 5 gal buckets. Part of his soil prep was pouring boiling water through the soil in the buckets, might work in sterilizing the terrarium soil.

Someone, it may have been Johnny, recommended that yes, other frogs are the best food for them, but its better to breed your own feeder frogs, or alternatively buy frog legs from the store and freeze them to kill parasites.

I don’t want to pamper my frog. I want it to be tough like my original frog was. But I can’t go to South America and get one right out of the wild either. I can’t bring myself to give up. I want to Make Pacman Frogs Great Again. But I may have to surrender and pamper some with sterile food and tanks to get them to breeding age. To kickstart natural selection, I need thousands of froglets.

Oh… wait. Didn’t I speculate in this thread that I can’t explain why pacmans haven’t been established in Florida where north Florida’s climate is almost a perfect match from where they come from in South America?

Maybe there is a pathogen here they can’t handle. I think all of my pacmans have had at least a few crickets from outside. I think there was maybe one that only ever got petstore or bait shop crickets because I lived in town and I didn’t trust insects from the yard to not have pesticides.

Most of my subsequent frogs have had vitamin supplements dusted on their food. The first frog after my original frog was kept unheated as my first was, and I figured that was what killed it. I had another one I didn’t heat and I figured that one also died because it got too cold with food in its belly. All the rest I’ve kept properly heated.

They just all seem weak. Not hardy. My first frog was an Ornata. All the rest were Cranwells, except of these last 3, one was an Ornata. It was doing awesome. No sign of issues. Then I just randomly found it dead just like I found Dana yesterday.

There’s plenty of native treefrogs where I live. No Cubans here. Cubans in north Florida are generally confined to urban areas. They don’t seem to thrive in the wilds.

One cold winter within the Ocala city limits a large Cuban overwintered underneath the gravel, under water, in one of my fish tanks. It came in from outside, found the tank, got in the tank, went underwater, and buried in the gravel. That leads me to believe they survive freezes in this manner in urban areas where man-made water sources offer artificially warm places to go.

My hound is no longer around to eat the native treefrogs. She liked to snack on them. So there ought to be more of them than normal hanging around the house in the months to come.

I fed my pacmans both GTFs and leopard frogs.

A distributor I've worked with before is about to hook me up with two ornate froglets. Here's my plan:

1. I'll play it safe and feed these two only captive-bred food. 

2. In addition to getting these two ornates, I'm going to spam as many cheap chain-petstore Cranwell's as I can, starting tomorrow. 

3. Coco-fiber has killed one of mine before via impaction, so that's a no-go for me (trust me, there's a reason I believe they're overall weak shadows of what the wild-caught ones used to be).

I have not yet decided how I'm going to house these. I'll have a few days to decide on the ornates, but the first Cranwell's out to be in my hands tomorrow. So I have to decide tonight. I do not yet know if I want to house them all in a shallow water setup (1970s-1980s setup), or just experiment with one and house the rest in a (post 1990s) traditional dirt/substrate setup. I have become aware that commercial breeders often use a shallow water setup. Ideally, I'd like to have both. I can make a partitioned setup well enough, but one thing I'm wondering is whether the water setup allows for easier management of waste and if the gravel is less of a bacterial mess than dirt. 

My long term goal is to breed these (even if I have to baby them to get them to breeding age) and then run the tadpoles and froglets through the gauntlet. That's how I got my chickens to beat disease. Spam hundred of them. A few of them will win the genetic lottery and come out with immunity to the local pathogens. 

(after thinking for several minutes before finishing my post)

I think my housing plan may be to use gravel and water as I did with my first pacman, add mechanical filtration and heating (which is something I didn't use with my first frog), and start setting up larger planted tanks for long-term bioactive ecosystems that will be very mature at the point I either transfer frogs to them or start new frogs in them. 



    

The ornates are in.

Making Pacman Frogs Great Again... by raising them by What Can Be, Unburdened By What Has Been.

I spoke too soon about the Cranwell preferring dirt.




He spends most of the day half-buried in the shallow water and gravel, as my childhood Ornate did.

I have various aquarium plants planted in the gravel. The one he's under is an Amazonian sword plant that has died back but is putting forth new growth. I also have a repens up near the filter that has rooted.

Speaking of the filter, I have a filter with various mediums circulating the water from under the gravel. My childhood pacman had no such filter. This should help keep the water cleaner and healthier for the frog. I theorize that between the plants becoming established and the mechanical filtration, the water won't have to be changed very often and the frog can remain healthy in a smaller tank for a longer amount of time.

The Cranwell now doesn't use the dirt unless it's full of water. I change the dirt out every few days by scooping it out and replacing it with "clean" dirt (dirt from a pet store).

The Cranwell has grown to maybe double size since I got it. I have been feeding it pet store crickets and discoid cockroaches, again from a pet store. We have a local reptile shop that I've been getting feeders from. Already the Cranwell is large enough to accept feeder pinky mice. Its last meal was a large discoid roach and it has refused food since (about 5 days ago). It hasn't had a poop since. When it poops, I figure it will be ready to eat again. When it does poop, I will probably buy a pinky and offer it to get some bones in the frog's belly for natural calcium.

The two ornates are being kept in separate tanks that are set up more like the generic care-guides suggest, which are a terrestrial setup with water dishes. I am taking care to try to mimic nature as close as possible, except that I don't have access to the South American plants of the Pompas and Chaco that they would be living around. The scientific documentation as to what sort of habitats they frogs live in is scant. There's plenty of information about the generic habitat, but little on the micro-habitats. For example, you can generically state that a particular animal lives in the Everglades. But that doesn't tell you whether it prefers to live out in the saw grass and water, or whether it prefers to live in the spots of high woods, hammocks, or cypress domes. That's how it is with the Ornate and Cranwell's horned frogs. The Ornates live on the Pompas, and the Cranwells' live in the Chaco. They breed in temporary pools of water in the wet season. That's about as detailed as it gets. One recent study I read said that Ornates like to live in sand, but the researchers believe that's only because the sandy areas of the Pompas are the last areas to be developed for agriculture, being poorer soil. I have found a few generic references to the frogs being found in the swampy areas along ponds. I've also found just a couple of videos of horned frogs from the wild, and it appears that they're in dark, rich, very damp, dirt full of leaf litter. They also like to sit against tree stumps and fallen logs. Overall it looks like the sort of areas you find in hardwood hammocks where the dirt borders a wet area and is partially saturated.

The green Ornate:



The red Ornate:




If I didn't say so previously, the soil is a mixture of "rainforest dirt," coco-fiber, bark, and live oak leaves. All from the pet store. The only thing not from a pet store is the live plant I'm using, called golden pothos.

The Ornates are eating crickets. There are also pill bugs in their tanks that I think they pick up every so often and some baby discoid roaches.

The green Ornate will sometimes soak in its water dish for a day at a time then return to the dirt. The red ornate never soaks that I've seen and just stays in the dirt. 

All three frogs go prowling at night looking for food. Temperatures are kept in the low-mid 80s in all 3 tanks. 

Why don't you just keep cats...like Ferris?
Hope this helps