Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Last month, one of my WTFs died very suddenly. It was fine, then that night I found it on the floor in the corner of the tank not moving and looking sick. I picked it up and it moved a little and died.

A little while ago, I came home and found one of my other ones on the floor of the tank looking extremely thin with sunken eyes. I sprayed it with water and it slowly dragged itself a couple of inches. I picked it up and it stuck its hind legs out straight and appeared to have died. I put it back in the cage for a couple of minutes and when I came back, its eyes were wide open and though its legs were still outstretched, it blinked when I sprayed water on it. I don't know why the frog is looking so thin; I've seen it eat recently and it was active (for a treefrog) earlier today.

Has anyone had this happen with a frog before? I've been keeping them warm, humid, and well-fed, so I have no idea what the problem is and it's really upsetting me

any help?
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Owen, who loves his snakes a lot.

I'm too new to frogs to have an answer for you but since I have a WTF I will be following this to see what others say. You might want to post a few more details to help those that come along-
How big or how old are/were they?
How warm and how humid (describe tank heating, size, set up, and ventilation if you don't have measurements)?
How many in the tank?
Did you get them all at the same time/ from the same source?
Was the source local or mail order?
Captive bred or wild caught?
Have you seen regular defications?

Hope someone has a likely cause even though we can't bring them back.

Yeah the answers to those questions will greatly affect the quality of answers you will recieve. You said you were keeping them warm, humid and well-fed, that sounds alright. What was the water quality like? What about the overall cleanliness of the enclosure? Other than like old age or something, the only thing that sounds like it would act in as fast of a manner as it did, is a bacterial outbreak. If you say that everything was clean and the water quality was ok, then I would ask about the diet. Were you dusting with calcium, vitmain d3, and what were you feeding them?

Yeah there were regular defecations and the water was kept clean. I always keep the substrate damp and mist heavily every day. There is a daytime basking spot in the mid-90s and the temperature dips into the mid 70s at night. I keep the cage clean. As for food, I give them gut-loaded crickets fed on different things like fish food, fruit, bread, grain cereal...I make sure they have significantly more calcium than fat in their diet.

Age, I don't know. I'm guessing a year old at most; both were about an inch or an inch and a half long. They were captive-bred and I bought them in September at a pet store in New Orleans. Maybe they got Katrina cough...I don't know. Just each death was very sudden and each frog seemed fine earlier in the day.

It's kind of depressing...they were mine and my fiancee's first pets
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Owen, who loves his snakes a lot.

Are you over dusting with calcium? Once when I was new in the frog game years back, I dusted the crickets with calcium every single feeding. Well after about a month or two I started to notice they had gotten sluggish, and then within 3 days half of them were dead, and within 2 more days the rest were dead except for one. It took the last one about a week to die.

I've never dusted; I rely on gutloading with a wide variety of foods.

But now that you mention it, I guess the two that died did seem a little sluggish beforehand, but they're frogs so I didn't really think anything of it.
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Owen, who loves his snakes a lot.

Well I don't know. It sounds like you haven't done anything wrong. Perhaps it was getting too much of something in its diet, or not enough of something.

I'm sorry about your loss.

One thing though, gutloading doesn't replace dusting with vitamin d3 at all. Most of the vit d3 that frogs get in the wild comes from natural light. Since we can't really give our frogs natural light, and some light is filtered through our windows so even placing near a window isn't enough (although it does help alot, even if only for an hour a day... or so I'm told) The symptoms of over dusting and not dusting enough can be similar.
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I think my frog owns a megaphone....

White's tree frogs : 1:1
Mantella viridis : 1:3