Minnow Breeding: Creating the Environment.

May 16 2008: After releasing the frogs and ending up with a spare tank, we’ve decided our next mission will be to try and breed our white cloud mountain minnows. Research has told us there couldn’t be an easier fish to breed, which sounded good to us. So we redesigned the old frog tank and turned it into a breeding tank. The minnows have been transferred from the main tank and we’ve attached spawning mops to the tank (basically strands of wool tied together, creating artificial floating plants for the eggs to stick to.) We’re feeding them live food; daphnia (or waterfleas) which we’re keeping in a container and feeding them a few every day. And now all we have to do is wait and see if they really are easy to breed.

Tadpole Diary: The Timeline

May 9 2008: I decided it would be useful to put up a rough timeline of important dates that this diary spans. It’s not very long but would save tralling through almost 20 posts to find the information you want.

Day 1: Collecting the frogspawn.
Day 4: The frogspawn fully hatched into tadpoles.
Day 7: The peak of their growth spurt.
Day 29: They began to grow legs.
Day 53: The first two tadpoles turned into frogs.
Day 59: They were released back into the wild.

Day Fifty-Nine: Homeward Bound

April 30 2008. So after two months, with hard work, several homes and some losses, we managed to successfully raise a handful of frogspawn into fully fledged little frogs. And today, we set them free. We found that with them needing live food, we couldn’t feed them properly. It was too difficult finding live food which they could eat. Especially with having such bad whether at the moment, all the bugs were buried deep into drier wood and stuff. One of them died, we don’t know if it was from starvation or drowning (they had a worrying habit of appearing to get stuck between the tub and the wall of the tank) but that triggered the decision. We let them go in the pond on campus where I’m sure they’ll be very happy. Goodbye little frogs!

Day Fifty-Six: Redecorating and Feeding Time

April 27 2008: As a third frog came along we decided we’d better give them a better home. So we did some redecorating. We decided they needed much more land than a few rocks pocking above the water so we filled a small tub with soil and placed it on one side of the tank. We then rebuilt up the rocks so they lead up to the tub so the frogs would be able to access it. A few well placed plants and a couple of pieces of wood and the tub of dirt looked quite nice!

Feeding was not so easy. We discovered that the frogs only ate live food. Somehow we thought they would eat frozen bloodworms and waterfleas. Research gone wrong I think. So we had to go bug hunting. In the rain. We got wet to say the least. But we dug up a good number of various crawlies of the creepy variety and carefully placed them into the tank (all flying bugs were avoided for obvious reasons). Unfortunately there’s no photographic evidence but the frogs did pounce on their live prey with delight! With one of them even taking on a small cockroach. It was oddly satisfying after scambling around in the dirt.