Frog help please

You can use beer traps now Article 50 has been triggered, very effective and sod the EU law

 

Zigs, I'm an Euro immigrant and will rebel as long as I can! My bulbs are 3 centimeters apart and my path 60 centimeters wide. There!

 

Sounds like Carl should be Carla; didn't you say she/he was large? Female frogs are larger than males, I believe.

I gave up slug pellets long ago. My best remedy is to go around with the salt pot at dusk....some won't approve but it works. In my experience birds avoid all but the smallest slugs; they just don't seem to like them. Encourage the frogs who will really help the slug problems.

 

not much of a beer drinker, prefer wine. So a cheap bottle of beer poured in a shallow dish for the slugs, to me, a better alternative than man made chemicals that could harm other little creatures. I do cook with beer sometime, beer bread, beer in my chili.

 

Frogs do not eat slug pellets as they only eat live food so if it came across a dead one (killed by pellets) it wouldn't be eaten either.

 

Slug pellets are deadly to slugs but the slugs do take a long time to die during which time the frogs (and other fauna) could and do eat them.

 

Not true, unfortunately - the pellets also incorporate a chelating agent such as EDTA which is what makes the iron phosphate toxic to slugs (iron phosphate on its own is not particularly toxic, including to slugs). The presence of EDTA also makes the pellets toxic to other wildlife, pets and humans.

 

Perhaps I should have said they do not eat anything that isn't moving. Some captive amphibians are fed dead food via a rod or something but it would be moved around in front of them.

 

You actually already have a solution to hand that requires no slug pellets at all. If you help large numbers of frogs to survive, they will eat all the slug larvae, meaning that within a year you will have almost no slugs at all. I have no slugs in my garden because I carefully nurse my tadpoles until they become frogs (I then end up with a garden that hops with hundreds of froglets, it's great fun!)

The main thing you will need to do is learn how to nurse the spawn, tadpoles, and the young froglets before they have left the water, but once you do, no more slugs (and substantially fewer clothes moths too, although for why I have no idea).

 

Incidentally, in response to strongylodon, frogs may not eat things that don't move, but I feed my tadpoles on dog food (once they reach the meat eating stage). If I didn't they'd starve and eat each other...

 

Armandi, that's really interesting as I think I put in about 1000 eggs, which resulted in at least a hundred making it to froglet stage.

As they take at least two years to reach maturity, sometimes three I believe, I didn't have any spawn in the second year, and the enclosed nature of my town garden (8 foot wall surrounded by acres of concrete car park in central London) means no frogs will have been able to arrive from elsewhere.

This year, however, at one stage I saw 12 frogs in the pond together, and another couple slightly smaller frogs under pots in the garden. Obviously these were only the ones I saw, so it seems likely that at least 3 times as many survived (which makes me think more might have survived to froglet stage too).

 

This a very interesting thread. I'm wondering if Frogs absolutely have to have a pond? Would they like/use something else such as a container filled with rainwater and a couple of oxygenators maybe?? I tried a large Belfast sink a couple of years ago but it didn't work - too shallow I think. How deep would a container need to be? Would a large plant pot or even a dustbin cut in half be suitable? I wondered about a plastic storage box ( the under the bed kind ), but that might be too shallow. I don't have much depth of soil here, so as a temporary measure I would likely be looking at a free standing raised container.

Rexluna where did you get frogs eggs from? And what kind of dog food do you use?