A Bull Frog Question

[GBov]

So, a quick background.

I have a 30 inch deep, 10 foot across kids above ground pool. It is situated in dappled shade in the Florida woods. As my kids decided sitting waist deep in cold water while being dined upon by mosquitoes and deer flies was stupid, it sat empty for a while until I thought, what the hell and dumped 25 Tilapia fingerlings into it.

Roll on a few more months and I finally found a source of duckweed so started adding that by the bucketful to feed the fish.

Still, it was a boring thing, a pool full of duckweed and invisible fish.

A local puddle full of young bullfrogs gave me the idea of cannibalizing the trampoline for parts - seriously, get one, they are sooo useful parted out - used the safety net to wrap the pool with to frog proof it and away to the puddle I went. Only caught 4 as the puddle was deep with deeper mud on the bottom but four was a nice start.

Two styrofoam floats, one of which has solar lights on it to help draw in bugs for them and, as I put a container of water on the ground beside the pool, sometimes when it rains I catch a new frog, think I am up to about 9 now but it is really hard to count frogs. :lol:

All is going swimmingly, everything healthy and growing but the frogs could be fatter. After all, the plan is to eat them. :twisted:

Finally, we get to my question.

Can I feed mealworms and mealworm beetles to young bullfrogs?

 

[akane]

Technically you can feed mealworms and just about anything else you can think of but normally you would do so in a contained area with a feeding dish that isn't going to spoil or escape before they find them. The captive frogs also have little choice and are used to the feeding dish. To just happen upon some mealworms in a big pool they may not find them near as appetizing and fail to eat them before something ruins the container of mealworms. Earthworms would be more easily recognized as food but do also have the downside of dying even faster if not found and eaten. If you do get them trained to an area waxworms or soldier fly larvae (can be bought as phoenix worms, repti-worms, calci-worms, or cultivated fairly easily outdoors) are more fattening. It might be possible to grow soldier fly larvae over your pool like many do for chickens with a bucket of material the flies will lay in and some holes near the bottom the larvae fall out of. Soldier flies are used for composting of especially animal products but will use other things and the adults do not bite human or animal and do not travel far from the area they are using to reproduce so people simply grow them in the poultry coop and pens or add them to their compost pile if it has a lot of animal waste to it rather than tough plant matter. Frogs would also eat the flies themselves. They make an easy concentrated source that feeds things on it's own just by topping up their food source.

In a natural outdoor setup you might also want to look at natural food sources. Part of your problem is likely the lack of tall water plants and the larger insects that would live among them preying on the small ones. As well the fact you are dealing with clean water that doesn't have the population of small water bugs and diversity a normal body of water would. If you scoop water out of a normal pond or lake to a tank you will get all sorts of weird critters and odd things growing that will take years to show up in an artificial body of water without that "contamination". Trying to go half and half where you don't commit to a fully maintained system and you don't fully setup a natural ecosystem with a substrate bottom, variety of plants, and variety of bottom of the food chain and cleaner critters may seem like less work but is often a headache to find and feed your inhabitants that can't get enough food on their own. You can start with adding some small fish if you haven't. Frogs will catch some fish and it will feed the bigger fish. Mosquito fish are a common live bearer used as the bottom of the food chain and of course controlling mosquitos in ponds and decorate water pools or fountains. Other livebearer species and some hardy egg layers would help as well but may be more expensive than the plain mosquito fish often used for situations you care less about the fish themselves than their purpose. Other small tadpoles and frogs are helpful rather than competitive. Bullfrogs are all out garbage disposal predators. They will even eat small snakes, crustaceans (baby crayfish), other amphibians including cannibalizing each other, and have been found eating small bats. If you start adding snails, water bugs, fish, other tadpoles, nymphs of dragonflies and mayfly, etc... to build up an ecosystem they will find food faster and more easily than trying to target feed essentially wild frogs in a 10' diameter pool with something that will die or be eaten by fish if it's left in there. Plants with more roots and height even if they are just larger floating varieties would also help bring in and support the larger insects and hide smaller fish or other tadpoles. Along with allow the bullfrogs a place to reproduce so you don't have to keep collecting your own a few at a time. Bullfrog eggs will make a lot more bullfrogs than a couple random tadpoles. Same for adding other frogs. If you see eggs scoop those but contain them from the fish in a breeding net or in a separate container of water nearby until they hatch to avoid them just being a food source.

 

[GBov]

Blimey, Akane! Thank you so much for all your information! And all I really wanted to be sure of is if it is safe to feed them to frogs!

My pool is as natural as I can make it, loads of Mosquito fish, the Tilapia, zillions of squiggly things that get scooped up, about every three weeks, in the 5 gallons of duckweed I feed to the Tilapia and the lights on at night to draw in flying bugs. No water hyacinth though as I can't find any that hasn't been hit with weedkiller :evil: and they would make the most sense in the setting. Nothing else would work other than cattails and there isn't enough on the bottom to anchor them into.

The frogs have all put on weight since I caught them, the puddle, while large, was just a, well, a puddle :lol: so not much to eat other than each other.

The biggest frog is always trying to catch the smaller ones.

For a landing spot I have two sheets of styrofoam, about 15 inches wide by 4 feet long. By now most of the frogs don't even bother to jump into the water when I walk up, they just goggle at me.

Good to know they can catch the minnows, better to know about the soldier fly larvae - soldier fly larva are my skull cleaners, they do a great job and I have loads of them - but feeding them might be a problem as they would fall into the water whereas the mealworms have legs to hold onto the styrofoam with.

I drop cutworms onto the landing pads and they get gone as soon as they start to move.

My yard is itsy tiny - 80 feet by 100 feet - so no chance of my raising breeding frogs. Good idea about adding tadpoles to grow into snack sized froglets for them though.

It makes me mental, the place I get the duckweed from is right by a house that has a gently sloping yard, right down into a beautiful swamp. PERFECT for frog lagoons and making pretty good money on its one acre. My yard though is as high and dry as you can get. *sigh* And our old 4H club has 10 acres and a spring-fed lake but they have no clue, I love them to bits but they couldn't organize escaping from a wet paper bag with a map, directions and a compass. :roll:

So my little frog experiment is just to see how many meals I can produce for 4 in that space with no added energy or bought feed. It is still water, the duckweed which feeds the Tiliapa comes from about 1.2 miles from home and the frogs are showing up on their own now but the first four came from 3 blocks away. The mealworms are my attempt to come up with something to do with the zillions I have produced in an old fridge but as I said, I wasn't sure if they were too spiky or tough for them.

Loving the free duckweed, I collect two 5-gallon buckets of it about every three weeks. One goes into the pond for the fish and the other goes onto the old trampoline mat to start drying. When it is half dry I bring it in to finish. Then I add it to my fermenting feed. It has made a nice difference to the egg production and the new bunnies look fantastic on it. Could do without having to womaneuver my net through razor grass to reach it though, ouchy.

How funny though, not one single person has stopped to ask what I am up to! :lol:

 

[michaels4gardens]

I used to pick up Water Hyacinth just past Interlachen,[like going to Palatka] on HW 20 on the north side of the highway.

 

[UFCreel]

Water garden shop look to water lily's. My friend has them in his pond and the fish and critters seem to like them. He does have to pull some out every year as they readily reproduce.

 

[Ghost]

Humm, typical GBov post.

"Hay I'm interested on some new cool animal ...

... and by the way I would like to eat them."

:nana: I know, I should talk, I joined so I could discuss guinea pig eating. Oh well, good luck.

 

[GBov]

Humm, typical GBov post.

"Hay I'm interested on some new cool animal ...

... and by the way I would like to eat them."

:nana: I know, I should talk, I joined so I could discuss guinea pig eating. Oh well, good luck.

:lol: :lol: :lol: Yep, keeping us all fed now that my kids are teens is proving to be harder than even I expected, and I remember my mum raising four of us.

The poverty line was a goal to aim FOR, not to complain about! :roll: :lol:

Good idea about the water lilies UFC but like the water hyacinths, I have yet to see a safe place to collect some. I did have a nice collection built up but sadly, they are all gone now, lost them during the move.

Trying to do this with no added influx of cash is proving interesting but well worth the doing. The pool cost $75 and the 24 fish cost $24 and other than a bit of gas to collect the duckweed, it has cost nothing.

M4G that is waaaay too far to drive just for one thing but I am keeping my eyes open. I did see a beautiful stretch of them right beside the road not long ago but it was a bumper to bumper four-lane so I did NOT stop. Not risking my life - more than snake bite, that is - for a plant. I had to pass up on the last fresh hit deer I saw not long ago for that same reason. The meat was not worth the risk.

 

[akane]

Try watching some aquarium groups or stopping by swaps. Particularly in warmer parts of the country where year round outdoor pools are common. Plant cuttings and extras of fast growers are often free or a few bucks from clean sources besides maybe algae and hitchhikers that you don't care about. Slow growing stuff can be expensive but plants float on the surface partially to have the resources to grow faster than typical aquatics so all those species end up in the compost half the time when people clear the extras. I've gotten buckets of mixed pond plants from people just scooping off the surface for $5. Since it's Iowa and I don't have an indoor pond like some I can only use the smallest stuff but often people didn't bother to sort it.

Duckweed is actually excellent forage and a great protein source for herbivores. It's almost worth filling a container with water and duckweed just to grow forage rather than bothering with soil. You don't have to water duckweed.

 

[GBov]

Akane, I am LOVING duckweed, if we get stuck here I will be growing it but so far, collecting it 10 gallons at a time is working well.

My house smells a bit swamp like right now as I have it all in the dining room drying in front of a fan.

I am certain that most of my critters would eat it green but fermenting it gives my feed a nice boost, all round.

 

[akane]

I'm not sure what happens when it ferments but fresh it's about 35% protein dry weight. Possibly higher. 86% or so of it is water so it takes a ton to make much concentrated nutrition out of but it doubles itself in days under good lighting with enough nutrients in the water so all you really need is the space to grow and collect enough. I probably netted an extra 2gallon bucket after compressing it some just out of a couple fish tanks weekly and was dumping it out in chicken, quail, or guinea pig pens.

 

[GBov]

I have five gallons of it drying and will measure what I get once dried a bit more carefully than my last one. This time I was also much more careful with collecting it so it is pretty free of leaves and sticks so will give me a better idea of how much I need to process to have a store of it.

Growing it is easy but I need to do it raised containers as my dog eats it. :roll:

__________ Thu Sep 20, 2018 6:25 pm __________

I have decided that bullfrogs are pretty cool and MUCH smarter than I first thought. They now wait for their mealworms and most of them don't even bother to jump into the water, they sit on the raft and let me pull it close so I can dump the banquet. :lol:

Counted 8 on the raft yesterday evening and caught a new one this morning. <br /><br /> __________ Sun Sep 30, 2018 8:26 pm __________ <br /><br /> Turns out they are not Bull Frogs at all, they are PIG frogs. :lol:

 

[akane]

As I was listing earlier bull frogs eat about anything. :lol: If you can convince them something is recognizable as food even when they wouldn't normally come across it they will eat every insect, amphibian, fish, reptile, and mammal that fits in their mouths. Most people just have them rather contained when they try to feed them things they wouldn't typically find easily in the wild.

 

[GBov]

As I was listing earlier bull frogs eat about anything. :lol: If you can convince them something is recognizable as food even when they wouldn't normally come across it they will eat every insect, amphibian, fish, reptile, and mammal that fits in their mouths. Most people just have them rather contained when they try to feed them things they wouldn't typically find easily in the wild.

I love them, best animals I have had for ages.