Feeding Toadlets?

Anyone know what to feed baby toadlets no bigger than the tip of my finger? One even has a little bit of it's tail still attached.

Thanks,
Karen

Firstly, the one with the tail nub almost certainly won't eat for you. Anurans, to the best of my knowledge all of them, absorb their tails completely before eating again.

For toadlets that small I suggest you try to get some springtails (Collembola). They'd probably manage one of the smaller fruitfly species too. Springtails can be cultured at home and you can buy kits. They're much less messy than the fruitflies and less noticeable if they escape!

What species of toad are those?

Hi John,

Thanks for answering. I am not quite sure what species these are. I think they may be good 'ol American Toads from listening to their parents call. They are all over our pond right now as the first batch just emerged from the water yesterday. We are homeschoolers so we try to observe everything. We have been watching them since conception and were so excited we wanted to bring them in for a few days to observe them (keeping the tank as much pond like as possible, of course). I tried to catch tiny flies for them in the evening but my net just wasn't big enough. Anyway we put them back with all their tiny little brothers and sisters. There are sooo many right now that when I dipped my small tank in the pond to rinse the mud out after releasing them, I came up with two more tadpoles with legs and long tails. They will hopping about very soon!

Karen

I'm rearing around 20 firebelly toadlets which our adults produced earlier this year. They are getting a daily supply of hatchling brown crickets, a couple of millimetres in size. I don't know if these would be any good for your toadlets, but ours love them! I tried fruitflies but they were more able to keep out of the toad's reach.

Hatchling (pinhead) crickets are ideal, but unfortunately they are hard to find. Only a few petshops carry them. I've tried raising my own, but it's not easy. They can be ordered by mail, but the shipping charges are insane.

I raise my own fruit flies (the flightless kind). I currently have some toadlets (Bufo woodhousii) that are doing great on a diet of dusted fruit flies. They have no trouble catching them. The flies are easy to culture.

In the immediate time frame, you could try using fruit scraps to attract wild fruit flies. Then you just have to figure out how to get them into a container with the toadlets. I keep a piece of cloth under the lid of my toadlet container to keep the fruit flies inside.

Overall, it may be better just to leave the tads and toads in the pond and observe them from there. If you have any exotic pets in your house, you run the risk of infecting the toadlets with foreign germs and then putting those germs back out in the wild (where they could infect the other toads in the pond). In general, it's not a good idea to keep animals captive and later release them, although I can certainly see the educational benefit to watching the metamorphosis process.

Fruit flies and springtails. To prevent the fruit flies from escaping, you could try spreading a thin layer of petroleum jelly around the tank edges so the flies cant climb over the jelly barrier, ensuring they wont escape the toadlets. Petco sells fruit fly cultures too.