# African Dwarf Frog Tadpoles journey



## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

I decided to make a journal to document my ADF tadpole journey. Mostly because I could barely find any info on them and all the info I can find is really conflicting and I also just want to document my journey. I am really busy though, I work a lot and taking care of tads is turning out to be really time consuming. So I'm not sure how often I'll be able to update this but I definitely will whenever something significant happens. And probably give at least a weekly recap. Please excuse any typos, I mostly use my tablet and my autocorrect hates me.

So I'm already a couple weeks into my journey so I'm going to try to remember everything up until now as best as I can. I guess I will start from the beginning. I was down to one lone ADF, Ed, (he just turned 2 btw, but recently has been floating a lot and stopped eating. Kinda seems like he has dropsy :/ ) so a few months ago I decided to get some friends for him. It took me months to find a pet store that had them in stock, but finally found some at a pet supplies plus an hour away from me. I bought 4 on May 11. They were all very skinny, and looked young. I thought I was buying babies. On the way home already one was floating in the bag and after I got home and got them in the q tank he crawled out of the water and was just hanging out on the side of the glass, fully out of the water. I squirted him with water but he continued floating in the water on and off for the rest of the day and in the morning he was on his back at the bottom of the tank dead. 

The second day another frog died without displaying and sickness symptoms. The remaining 2 seemed fine. About 2 weeks later they boy, still nameless, started singing 12 hours a day (no exaggeration) everyday. And that's when I started suspecting I didn't buy babies. After feeding them everyday they plumped up pretty quickly, so that plus the singing and they tads (which they don't reach sexual maturity until 9 months of age) leads me to believe these were someone's pets, that for whatever reason they returned to the petstore. 

On May 23 I found hundreds of eggs in my tank and decided yo try to raise them. Everything I saw online said to use a turkey baster to suck the eggs out and put them in a cup. I accidentally popped pretty much every egg during the transfer. They were laying eggs everyday so I tried everyday, if I did manage to get eggs into the tank they would all pop overnight and in the following days. So I started leaving the eggs in the tank and on May 31 I found about 18 tads in the tank. I moved them to a separate cup with some duckweed. 

My frogs pretty much continuously lay, every week a couple do die but they are so busy I am up to 60 tads! I did have 61 but one died. I do have some from the original batch though. Maybe 8 or so. They are pretty big but still don't have legs. 

But now it's 230am and I am very tired so I think I'm going to stop for now. I will throw in a couple pictures but not all, yet, I have tonssss. In the next entry I'm going to talk about my tank setup, what didn't work for me and what did, including things I read online that said absolutely won't work but do for me. Plus I will include info from a girl I've been talking to online that's also raising tads. Some things have worked for her but not me and vice versa. This hobby or whatever definitely seems to be an individual thing. It's not a one size fits all. What works for some does not work for others. 

Here are the frogs the day I bought them 










Some of the eggs










The first batch of tadpoles I had











And the 60 tads I have now, there is 61 in the pic but one died


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## Nimble (Aug 31, 2014)

Very cool! I've never heard of anyone keeping breeding pairs of African Dwarf Frogs (though it probably happens more often than you'd think), so this is very interesting.

Keep posting.


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Nimble said:


> Very cool! I've never heard of anyone keeping breeding pairs of African Dwarf Frogs (though it probably happens more often than you'd think), so this is very interesting.
> 
> Keep posting.



Thanks!! It was definitely not on purpose! I was just looking for some pets. From what I've read getting them to breed is really rare and hard though and I've kinda always wanted tadpoles so I'm letting them go at it


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Not a full update because I'm really sick (possibly food poisoning?? I don't really know. Started getting sick on Saturday, slept 15 hours straight and literally only woke up because my dog was barking. Still feel horrible and didn't get out of bed today) so yesterday I came home and checked on Winnie and her hubby and found more tadpoles! I'm up to 74 now!! I also found out they are a lot more hardy than I thought. I feel very tired and weak and honestly couldn't bear to get out of bed to do anything so they didn't even get fed until 4pm (their last feeding before that was like 9pm the night before) and I didn't even really look at them. I usually do do several small water changes a day to ensure clean water and today I didn't do ANY water changes or even really look at them until 10pm. I was honestly expecting some deaths but there were none. There is one that doesn't seem to be doing well but he hasn't been doing well for a few days. I'm not sure when I can give a full update because I'm REALLY behind at work and today I found out my deadline has been moved up 2 weeks to this Friday, super unexpected. I also haven't done a water change on either of my fish tanks and I feel like death so this week will be interesting.


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Things have taken a drastic turn. I was very sick, got behind at work and my deadline was moved up again. From Friday to today (Wednesday). A few days ago ago 2 tads died so I had 72. I was still doing all the proper maintenance but feeding twice a day instead of 3-4 times a day and the 2 feedings sometimes wouldn't be until later in the day instead of evenly spaced through the day. On Tuesday while doing maintence it seemed like I had less tads but it's a pain to count them and none were dead do I didn't think anything of it. I also noticed my biggest one was pooping like black stringy bits, super weird cause it should be orange (the color of the food) today I noticed a ton of tads were missing. So I counted. I have 25. My 3-4 biggest boys went cannabalistic and ate the others. I removed those 4 to a floating breeder tank in my big tank. So in my critter keeper I have 21 and probably half of them aren't doing well. I'm guessing from being picked at the past 2 days. I'm feeling a lot better so I can go back to feeding them often again. I feel so terrible about this though. But looking back, perhaps it wasn't the smartest to put tads of all different ages together. I had no idea they would actually eat each other though. I hadn't seen that mentioned anywhere online before. I suppose it makes sense though, I mean if it fits in the mouth.


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## AmazingBettas (Feb 28, 2017)

Wow cool, I've wanted an ADF for a while now...

They're cute 

I didn't know they sung though... I guess it makes sense since they're frogs...


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

AmazingBettas said:


> Wow cool, I've wanted an ADF for a while now...j
> 
> They're cute
> 
> I didn't know they sung though... I guess it makes sense since they're frogs...


ADF are the best! You should get some! If you have room for them


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

On 7/3 I noticed my biggest tad had little toes on his feet stumps, by the evening his legs had unfused. On 7/5 he started getting little arm nubs and today he now uses his legs when he swims. I don't think I ever mentioned I went out and bought a second 1g critter keeper. So the big boys are the n one and the little boys are in another. I no longer use the floating breeder net. I did have 6 big boys but 2 died, so I'm down to 4. And I'm down to about 10 little guys. Someone in the little guys is still eating other tads, I'm just not sure who it is. They are all about the same size. Last time it was obvious cause they were way bigger than all the others. This time I really have no idea.


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

My first tads































































When my big guy first got his leg stumps









Here he is when his legs unfused and he got his toes. 









I don't have pictures of his arms yet


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

I was wrong, you can see his arms here


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## Nimble (Aug 31, 2014)

Stumpy!


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Nimble said:


> Stumpy!


Are you suggesting stumpy for a name?


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## Nimble (Aug 31, 2014)

Any recent updates?


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Nimble said:


> Any recent updates?




Omg I completely forgot all about this journal! I was only able to raise one tadpole to adulthood. It was a female I named bindi. She died a week before she turned one year old. Her parents died shortly after she was moved to my fish tank. I can't really remember the circumstances. But I'm guessing bindis early death was just due to poor genetics cause all the frogs that I bought with bindis parents died fairly soon and seemed unhealthy. Also I did have one tadpole that was like deformed and despite the deformities (both arms and legs were like fused folded up to its body) was doing really well. I think that one only died because it was having problems getting food/air. Cause it couldn't really swim well. I'm pretty sure I still have most of the pics that I never got to upload on here saved. I'll go find them now and get them uploaded. 


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## charliegill110 (May 19, 2014)

Here are the pictures I was able to find including the deformed tadpole 



































































































































































I read through this journal quickly and I had said I wanted to talk about things that worked for me that didn't work for other people/ things that didn't work for others but did work for me and I never got the chance to do that. I have some big stuff at work right now but later thing month I want to make that entry. I can remember some of the stuff I planned on talking about and then I think I remember the people who I asked advice from so I think I'll be able to make a pretty comprehensive entry. After bindi died I told myself no more frogs and even just threw away 40$ worth of frozen food that I had bought 2 days before she died to force myself to be done. But I do miss frogs. 


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