stickyfrog wrote:
Are you doing experiments or do you just have a penchant for amphibians? Inquiring stickyfrogs want to know.
well, i have a pond in my garden. when i moved in it was full of horrible bug-eyed goldfish. the pond filter was stolen by local yoof, so the bug-eyed goldfish went off to live somewhere else, and i converted the pond to a self-sustaining ecosystem. frogs moved in, laid eggs, and voila - hundreds of froglets.
i introduced some newts a year or two later, not knowing that they are, um, 'incompatible' with frogs below a certain size i.e. they will eat them up
so every year the frogs lay eggs, and every year the newts grow fat on tadpoles. i don't deal well with carnage, so i'd been giving spawn away to mates with ponds, but they are now all frogged out, so i've got to deal with the spawn myself. last year's hatching tank was a dismal failure - temperature too high, insufficient surface area for oxygen exchange, tank used by local squirrels for bathing. disaster.
this year, i've installed a plaster-mixing tank, which is basically a miniature bathtub. however there was an awful lot of spawn, and the number of tadpoles unfortunately exceeded the limit that the tank could support. hence the massive die-off, and the drastic actions as described above, which seem to have worked, so i've got about 50 happy tadpoles in there now
it's when they all grow legs and start hopping around the garden that the real fun begins. the first time the frogs spawned (before i'd introduced the newts) every single bloody egg hatched, the garden was completely overrun with tiny frogs (i mean,
hundreds of them), and i had to cut the lawn with scissors for the entire summer
