By Jan McArthur, RVT

I walked into a local pet store one day in March 1997 to buy my usual weekly pet supplies. I have owned turtles and anoles for years, so I've gotten to know the pet-store personnel. The clerk working at the store that day knew that I am a registered veterinary technician, which is why she pounced in me when I walked in the door. They had just received a shipment of White's tree frogs and New guinea tree frogs that they had not ordered. Many of the frogs were dead and the others were dying. The clerk asked me to take a couple of the New Guinea green tree frogs so I could try to save at least those two. The Pet store could not sell sick frogs, she explained, and they had no room to keep them. The only solution was to try to give them away. She believed they had "red-leg" disease.

I have many years of experience keeping reptiles, but not amphibians. One of the frogs died immediately after I got home. I own a copy of Douglas Mader's Reptile Medicine and Surgery, so I looked in the book and verified that the symptoms were like those of bacterial septicemia, or "red-leg." Both the dead and the still living frogs' legs and bellies were absolutely bright red! I'm to a doctor, and I don't have access to medication, so of course I didn't try to treat this poor little thing myself.

Off to the veterinarian's clinic we went. My veterinarian also owns a copy of Reptile Medicine and Surgery, so he looked up bacterial septicemia and made a diagnosis. He then mixed up a prescription for treating the one living frog, now named Tad P. Frog. He sent me home with oral and injectable antibiotics and some tuberculin syringes. Unfortunately, he hadn't noticed that the injections should be given in the front part of the body, and because of this, she didn't get much better in the days that followed her examination. She was taking oral medication also, and this must have kept her going for a few days until I read the passage in the book abut giving the injections that the front end of the body. I discovered that it is not easy to inject the forearm of a tiny frog, but we managed to dot hat here at home. My husband would hold poor Tad P. Frog down while I injected the medication. The doctor told me to inject her every 48 hours for six weeks. I was so afraid that she would die that I disinfected her home on a daily basis.

The oral medication was to be given twice daily for a shorter amount of time that then injectable medication. I had a slight problem giving her the oral medication because I didn't want to injure her mouth. I was afraid that if I forced her mouth open too often, I'd cause another infection through the abrasions I might cause. I decided to try something I'd read in the book, injecting the oral medication into a cricket. I hoped that Tad P. Frog would eat the cricket immediately after it was injected. The crickets are very difficult to inject without killing them, so I picked the largest ones I could find that hadn't yet developed wings. It worked! If I fed her the cricket fast enough it wouldn't die right away. She'd see it moving and she'd eat it.

Tad remained lethargic for a few weeks. She slowly came out of it and the redness began to fade away. I know that sometimes these tree frogs naturally have a pin coloration to the underside, but that pink looks different that the bright red of the disease.

I think we traumatized her a little, because she didn't seem to want to even see us at all for months after this. She was a nervous frog for quite sometime following this treatment. Now 1998 is almost over, and she is still here. Though she is still a nervous frog, she doesn't seem as afraid of us as she once was. At night when she awakens, she happily soaks in her pool and basks in the simulated moonlight. She had grown a tiny bit, so I guess this means she was not quite an adult when she came her to live.

The success we had with Tad P. Frog piqued our interest in amphibian keeping so much that we purchased another frog. We bought an albino Argentine horned frog neonate named Sunny. In honor of Tad, we created a web site named Tapfrog's Home page, complete with pictures of both frogs, our yellow mud turtle, painted turtle, pet rats, dog, and bird. We decided to make this noncommercial page a real source for pet information, and what is thrilling to us, Texas A&M linked our site to theirs under their public-education section.

Reprinted from Reptiles magazine, February 1999 issue.

Copyright 1999 All rights reserved

Jan McArthur, RVT