Cleaning The Tank

Hi and welcome back to the Frog Blog! I havn’t added to this blog in a few years because I havn’t been succesful at finding spawn. But this year I am hopeful and I’m going to try again in multiple places. The last year I tried to collect spawn I checked the road-side ditches out in the country but they were all dried up, so this year I am going to look in storm water managment ponds around my city because I have found spawn there once in the past and have released my past frogs in those areas. I am very hopeful this year.

I was going over my past posts and realized I mentioned cleaning of the tank but didn’t do an in-depth explaination of how I do this with my frogs, so that’s what this post is about today.

When the tadpoles have just hatched they don’t poop too much so its not a huge deal and the filter keeps it pretty clean, but soon when their a bit bigger like a few days of maybe two weeks old you will notice the tank gets pretty foggy, the water gets pretty nasty and it’ll start to stink, then it is time to switch the water.

With fish this is also a neccisary thing to do, but it is much harder with tadpoles as there are so many of them you can’t just scoop them out with a net easily. Instead you’ll want to leave a large bucket of water outside to collect rainwater in, then take your tadpoles’ container outside with a kitchen strainer. (Make sure you don’t use this strainer for food and it’s a seperate strainer just for tadpoles.) Slowly dump the tadpoles and their water through the strainer, this will catch the tadpoles but let the water dump on the ground. Do this in small sections and put the tadpoles into the rain water bucket as quickly as possible. Once the baby frogs are all into the rain water, slowly dump them and the water into their container.

I have found that in the past my tadpoles have seemed to be shocked at the temperature of their new water and they swim a little slower at first, but once they are used to it and the water gets a bit warmed up, they’ll act normal once again.

This can be a tricky and stressful process but it is totally necisarry as the filter can not filter out the poop of hundreds of little tadpoles. You should do this about every three days but it really depends on how many frogs you have.

Thank you for following along with my frog journey, I am very happy to be posting again, let’s all keep our fingers crossed and hope I will be able to find frogs this year!