# What can I feed TADPOLES?



## FlyGap

So to get our kid excited about hiking with us every evening we told her she could catch some tadpoles out of a pond down the road.
Now I have to keep them alive! 
No, I'm not going to go get pond scum or algae out of that pond or ours!

Whadda I got in the kitchen/yard that will work? Can they eat goldfish food?
HELP!


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## Endiku

I'm not sure what to feed them...I ordered mine and they came with powdered flies (yuck!)

Make sure that you give them something to hop up onto though, once they start getting back legs. Otherwise they'll drown.


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## Wallaby

Oh man, former tadpole catching professional here! I spent every summer catching and caring for my tadpoles. I actually caused the salamander population to go extinct in my pond because I caught so many babies... 
It was so much fun!

First thing, are they really frog babies or are they salamanders?

Frog:










Salamander:










Salamander tadpoles will have sticky-out-y frilly gills while frog gills aren't obvious, that's the way to tell them apart at the first stage.

If they're salamander babies (what I had) going to the pet store and buying freeze dried daphnia, until they grow back legs, and freeze dried bloodworms when they start growing legs works well. You basically want to feed them kind of like fish, put in enough that they eat it pretty quickly. I liked to give a little extra to make sure they're eating enough as well.
They also adored live mosquito larva.

Frog tadpoles need vegetable matter. I used to blanch the living daylights out of lettuce and they loved that. They don't need/want meat like salamander do. Basically any vegetable, cooked until it's really soft, will do the trick. I've heard that lettuce and cucumber slices are real winners.

Salamander tadpoles might eat the fish food but I doubt that frog tadpoles will.


I don't know how much you know but I'll just share with you the other things I learned while I was being "Tadpole Captain" :lol::

An important thing is that unless the tadpoles have something breaking up their line of vision, the biggest one WILL eat the smaller ones until he/she is the last baby left. Lemme tell you, it's SUPER traumatic checking on "your" babies and find that they're eating each other! :shock: 
I liked to get those super cheap plastic plants from the pet store, tie some rocks to them with fishing line, and stick them in the tanks. i found that about 2 plants that went from the bottom to the surface of the water per 5 gallons was about right.
*ETA:* I'm not super experienced with frogs, since I primarily had salamanders, but this website looks to be pretty helpful and complete:
http://allaboutfrogs.org/info/tadpoles/index.html

Also, make sure to always dechlorinate the water before adding water to your buckets/bins. I had so many babies die because I didn't do that! That was also traumatic, so sad.

When I was really doing it, I found that using 20+ gallon Rubbermaid storage bins worked super super well. They were cheap and the tadpoles seemed much more at ease in them then they did in the 5 gallon buckets I started out using. Before I started using the larger tubs, I had about a 75% mortality rate but after I started using the tubs my mortality rate went down to about 25%.



Tadpoles are so much fun! Thinking about this makes me want to go search some out and start playing with them again. :lol:


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## FlyGap

Good idea!
I kept trying to get her to catch the bigger ones so I wouldn't have to take care of them for so long, like GET THE ONES WITH LITTLE LEGS!
Oh, no! We had to get the "baby" ones.


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## Kristi46773

Im pretty sure the pet store has Tadpole pellets....thats what we fed ours when we had them.


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## attackships

i fed mine some leafy green salad, they grew up into little frogs just fine


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## FlyGap

Wallaby you ROCK!
They are for sure tadpoles, wish I could find some salamanders! That would be awesome! I have seen some really neat ones around our pond, black with white and red dots!
So far I've got a few in an old glass goldfish bowl. My kids aquarium has an algae problem so I dropped a few in there. If they die they die, or they will clean the tank. Current fish isn't interested in them, whew.
Got lettuce and cucumbers so I'll give em a boil. I have successfully in the past fed them wild cherry leaves that I found at our old place but we don't have them around here.

Thanks so much!


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## FlyGap

The pet store is an hour and a half away... so no go there.  And the last thing I'm going to do is pay for another animals keep! LOL! I'll just go chuck em in our pond and say they died if it looks like they won't make it.

Pretty sure these are tree frog tadpoles, so that's going to be interesting!


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## Lockwood

*Holy Sheisters Wallaby!* 
I bow down to your amphibian superiority!!
:clap:


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## Wallaby

Lockwood said:


> *Holy Sheisters Wallaby!*
> I bow down to your amphibian superiority!!
> :clap:


Aww shucks.


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## TexasBlaze

When i was little i had some bull frog tadpoles and i always fed them corn meal and they ended up making it to froghood xD


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## SueNH

You can buy veggie wafers made for algae eating fish in walmart.


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## franknbeans

Taking notes....filing away in my brain until grandson is a couple years older.....I used to catch newts.....guess those are salamanders, but had no idea what to feed them. THanks Wallaby! WE will probably have tadpoles at least at some point.


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## FlyGap

Well they are dead. Wallaby did you mean iceberg lettuce? Cause romaine killed the poor things. The fish in the aquarium is about 5 times fatter too! I thought there was NO WAY he could gobble those things, his mouth is tiny tiny but alas they are gone and the fish is FAT!

Sue, I have those wafers under the sink!! I'll give those a try on round two! Lol!! Poor dears!
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## Wallaby

FlyGap said:


> Well they are dead. Wallaby did you mean iceberg lettuce? Cause romaine killed the poor things. The fish in the aquarium is about 5 times fatter too! I thought there was NO WAY he could gobble those things, his mouth is tiny tiny but alas they are gone and the fish is FAT!
> _Posted via Mobile Device_



Oh no! Sad day. I always used romaine or red leaf lettuce and my guys were fine. Maybe the fish ate the lettuce too quickly/too exuberantly for the little guys? 
I always found that my tadpoles were rather sensitive creatures. Sensitive to water quality, sensitive to stress, sensitive to weird diseases, etc. Maybe being in with the fish is too much stress for them? 
Definitely try the algae wafers, I never used those (never knew about them actually!) but I bet they'll work just as well as the lettuce...or maybe better in your case. :shock:

Side note: you say they're gone... Gone as in dead or gone as in disappeared? If they disappeared and the fish is super fat, I'd wonder about the fish eating them... I found, when I was keeping fish, that sometimes they harass each other or nibble on something in their tank only when I wasn't watching...

I'm bummed that they died!


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## FlyGap

You are awesome !
I put 5 in the fish tank and the rest were in a large round fishbowl. I have well water that I purify for the fish but I used their pond water in the bowl with just the tads. All the poor things are dead! The fish ate the 5 and seems quite content with himself! Evil doer!!

We will attempt it again when we hike Monday and I'll let you know how the waivers go! Maybe I put too much lettuce in, only a 1/3 of a leaf, boiled and cooled. IDK?
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## Celeste

I have raised a lot of toad tadpoles. They do pretty well on fish food.
The biggest thing to remember is that when they are grown, they can't be left in the aquarium. They will drown. Even if you give them a place to get out of the water, frogs and toads will only eat live food once they are no longer tadpoles.

What do the adult salamanders eat?


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## autumnheart

FlyGap said:


> Well they are dead. Wallaby did you mean iceberg lettuce? Cause romaine killed the poor things. The fish in the aquarium is about 5 times fatter too! I thought there was NO WAY he could gobble those things, his mouth is tiny tiny but alas they are gone and the fish is FAT!
> 
> Sue, I have those wafers under the sink!! I'll give those a try on round two! Lol!! Poor dears!
> _Posted via Mobile Device_


 
Hahaha, "his mouth is tiny tiny but alas they are gone and the fish is FAT!" That made me laugh.
When I was little I went on a field trip with my school to the woods and high up this hill was a pond with tadpoles. I wasn't allowed to catch any then, so I dragged my family back that night and caught some myself. Can't remember how that turned out, I imagine they died pretty darn quickly. :wink:


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## EmilyJoy

FlyGap said:


> Wallaby you ROCK!
> They are for sure tadpoles, wish I could find some salamanders! That would be awesome! I have seen some really neat ones around our pond, black with white and red dots!
> So far I've got a few in an old glass goldfish bowl. My kids aquarium has an algae problem so I dropped a few in there. If they die they die, or they will clean the tank. Current fish isn't interested in them, whew.
> Got lettuce and cucumbers so I'll give em a boil. I have successfully in the past fed them wild cherry leaves that I found at our old place but we don't have them around here.
> 
> Thanks so much!


Have you ever tried cabbage? We never blanched it and it worked fine...


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## EmilyJoy

FlyGap said:


> You are awesome !
> I put 5 in the fish tank and the rest were in a large round fishbowl. I have well water that I purify for the fish but I used their pond water in the bowl with just the tads. All the poor things are dead! The fish ate the 5 and seems quite content with himself! Evil doer!!
> 
> We will attempt it again when we hike Monday and I'll let you know how the waivers go! Maybe I put too much lettuce in, only a 1/3 of a leaf, boiled and cooled. IDK?
> _Posted via Mobile Device_


 Maybe you should get organic lettuce? I know the reg. (not sure about organics) lettuce is being sprayed with plastic that would take a scrub brush to get off...And maybe that is their problem _if _the lettuce is what caused some deaths...In all honesty, algae works great...:lol:

Also I've heard that spinach boiled then frozen works just as well, just drop the frozen flakes into the water...and (for the tadpoles) enjoy!


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## FlyGap

Maybe thats what happened. IDK? Poor poor things.

We haven't hiked by that particular pond again so no new tads yet, but she's been talking about it! We'll see. I can't STAND killing baby animals, so sad. So I'm gonna do everything POSSIBLE to make the next ones live! LOL!


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## sonsedg68

I too used to catch and nurture tadpoles, i used to feed mine baby fish food the sort thats already liquified didnt lose any doin this  then released them where i got them from when they had all there legs.


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## FlyGap

IT'S A MIRACLE!!! Found 1 still living in the fish tank!! And it's grown. The kid found it, of course! Live sucker LIVE!

Also found a small salamander under the horses water trough when I cleaned it out today! Great day on the farm!
_Posted via Mobile Device_


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## 2horses

Back in my preschool teaching years, a parent brought in a huge jar full of tadpoles and pond water. It was full of all the algae/plants that would have been in the pond. She told us not to feed them anything else. Those tadpoles survived for a very long time but never turned into frogs. It was the strangest thing. We had to give them back to her at the end of the year. It seemed like they lasted for months without changing.


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## Celeste

Sounds like you had a complete little ecosystem going with the plants and algae as feed for the tadpoles and other critters in the water. They probably would have done more maturing with more feed; however, the water might have been harder to keep clean.


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## Darrin

In my young boy days I raised quite a few tadpoles to frogs. All I did was take a bucket with me, fill it with pond water/algae then started catching tadpoles. I left them in that, once their legs started growing I tossed in a stick for them to crawl up on and eventually get out on their own.

We've just recently started getting into fish and found out that you don't want to do a 100% change out of water if you don't do it very frequently. They get used to their own "soup" and suddenly adjusting to clean water can shock them to death. Makes me think tadpoles have the same issue.


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