The Wyvern's Lair : Amphibians : Gray Treefrogs - from eggs to froglets

In April of 2001, I was presented with a small mass of gray tree frog eggs. The person who brought them to me had found them on the lid of a bucket in a small depression of rainwater. For some odd reason the momma frog laid the eggs on the lid of a bucket rather than in a nice shallow pond or puddle. The eggs were very tiny, each about the size of a pinhead (~1.5 mm / 1/16"). Half of the eggs were fertile and hatched successfully. This was going to be my first time raising tadpoles of any type from start to finish :)

For the next several weeks, I raised a nice little bunch of active wiggly tadpoles. I housed the tadpoles in a medium sized bowl filled with tap water that had been pretreated with Amquel to remove toxic chlorine and chloraimine. I kept two gallons of pretreated water on hand in jugs at all times. I did not use any filtration on my tadpole setup. Every day I would simply clean the setup and replace the water. To clean, I would fill a cup with pretreated water and set it aside. I would then pour the frogs and their dirty water into a fish net. I would then sit that net into the cup of water to keep the tadpoles safe while I cleaned their bowl and added fresh water. After replacing the water, I would put the tadpoles back into the bowl. When the tadpoles first hatched, they were too tiny to go into the net as they could fit through the tiny mesh so cleaning was a matter of tedious patience. I would carefully pour some of the dirty water out into another bowl and doing my best to not let any tadpoles slip out (the second bowl would catch any tadpoles that accidentally got through rather than letting them go down the drain). I would swish the water around to stir up more debris and pour again. If the water level got too low, I would add more and keep doing this until I got most of the debris out before refilling the bowl up. Once the tadpoles were large enough to not fall through the net cleaning was a snap. The photo of the tadpoles was when they were a little over a month old. They measured 0.75 - 1.25 inches snout-tail length at this point. It was from this still-shot photo that I was finally able to get a near complete count of how many tadpoles I wound up with... roughly 90.

Their entire diet during the tadpole stage consisted of Hikari algae tablets. At first they were given a quarter of a tablet every day. As the tadpoles got larger and hungrier, I gradually upped the amount. At their greediest, the tadpoles were going through two tablets a day. Once the tadpoles began metamorphosis into froglets, the amount of tablets given was cut back as there were fewer tadpoles to feed. Overfeeding on the tablets would cause the water in the bowl to become cloudy by the next day. As long as the water was clear, I was not overfeeding the tadpoles.

When the tadpoles began showing their back legs, I moved them all to a larger container. The cage was a plastic critter cage that had a secure lid. I placed a nice irregular shaped rock into the tank to give the future froglets a place to climb out once they produced their front legs. I made sure that this tank's lid was secure at all times as I did not want newly changed froglets to climb right on out overnight. Towards the end of June, the first of the tadpoles began the process of metamorphosis into froglets. Not all of the tadpoles changed at the same time, they staggered the process over the next 3 weeks. To give you an idea of the size of the little frogs after metamorphosis -- they measured about 1/4 inch in length. Out of the numerous tadpoles, I had 77 survive the harrowing process to become froglets.

All new froglets that had their full complement of legs were removed when found and placed into their new terrarium to prevent drowning. It would be another day or so before they would fully absorb their tails. I then began feeding them pinhead crickets and fruit flies. Occasionally when I could find them I would also throw in termites. It is amusing that when they were tadpoles I spent less than $3 on food for them total, but now that they are piggy little tree frogs, they chow down on about $40-50 in food a week! I was going through two to three thousand pinhead crickets and a couple of vials of fruit flies every week. Now that I have several fruit fly cultures established and going reproduction wise, I am able to cut back on the overall cost of food and no longer having to purchase the expensive vials of fruit flies. As a lot of reptile and amphibian keepers are fond of saying, the cheapest part of the hobby is the animal itself...it's everything else that goes with the animal that will drive you to the poor house :)

On a sad note, about 3 weeks after all tadpoles changed to froglets, I no longer have to feed as many hungry mouths as I originally had been. I lost 16 froglets due to failure to thrive. This was to be expected, even kept in captivity under optimal conditions some are just not destined to make it. However, what really hit me hard is that I keep my frog terrarium on my desk at work. Apparently, on days when I am not there, someone(s) had been tampering with it. When I noticed the tampering, I immediately pulled everything out of the cage and came up with only 13 tree frogs. Somewhere along the lines, I am now missing 50 tree frogs. I do not know if they were stolen or escaped from the tank when it was tampered with, as both are equally likely scenarios. I will continue to raise the remaining frogs and take additional photos showing their progress to adulthood.

The froglet's terrarium "nursery"

August 2001

The next round of photo updates begins. The froglets are now measuring between 1/2" to 3/4" snout-vent length. I altered their terrarium by removing a fake plant group on the one side of the tank and replaced it with a live branching house plant to give them some new variation of texture for clinging to. The ghostly one thought he could get the jump on the others for breakfast by hanging out inside the fruit fly cup.

Recently I was asked as to which species of Gray treefrogs these are. We have both the Common Gray, Hyla versicolor, and Cope's Gray, H. chrysoscelis, in our area. I am assuming for the time being that frogs are H. versicolor. This species is more common to find and the area from where the eggs originally came from is a significantly further north of the areas where I typically would hear H. chrysoscelis calling.