Reptile & Amphibian Forums

.
-----
Check Out My Albums

1.0 Ball Python
"Aragorn"

1.0 Kenyan Sand Boa
"Gimli"

0.1 Australian Cattle Dog/Pointer
"Kira"

For some reason many people seem convinced that distilled water will cause a treefrog to blow up, or have salts sucked out of it and other nonsense. Basically tree frogs rely on the fact that the water they are bathing in has less solutes in it than them (or the cells in contact), otherwise they would never be able to absorb the water in the first place. It doesn't matter if the water is therefore distilled, or tap water, as the homeostatic mechanisms in the frog will 'tell' it when it has absorbed enough water, so it will jump out or use other methods to stop too much water being taken into the bloodstream, which may take a while to explain on this thread.

Hope this helped anyway. You hear so often that distilled water is bad for frogs on websites and forum threads. Rainwater is often more similar to distilled water than tap water, so how would the animals cope naturally?

As I've been confused about what's so wrong with distilled water and no one could tell me why. Seems like maybe one of those things that one person said and just got passed around as gospel or an old outdated line of thinking.

Thanks again!
-----
Check Out My Albums

1.0 Ball Python
"Aragorn"

1.0 Kenyan Sand Boa
"Gimli"

0.1 Australian Cattle Dog/Pointer
"Kira"

Most of what I am about to say can be found in the Kingsnake.com link below.

I'm not convinced that making a generalized statement that reverse osmosis water or distilled water is safe for amphibians, and a statement like that should not be made without a disclaimer. Apparently, many institutions use reverse osmosis or distilled water for their amphibians, but it is not clear if they reconstitute into a solute safe solution. I do know for a fact that the National Amphibian Conservation Center in Detroit (of whom it is safe to say that they are the definitive source for amphibian husbandry) uses RO but uses a complex formula for reconstituting it. The Bronx Zoo does the exact same thing. The Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry book also emphasizes the need for dissolved ions in water for developing amphibians, especially calcium. Several paragraphs are dedicated to the experimental results of amphibian calcium levels given access only to water with no calcium.

"the homeostatic mechanisms in the frog will 'tell' it when it has absorbed enough water"
Is this your own intuition, or do you have literature to support this phenomenon? Experiments done on substrate preferences on salamanders, for instance, does show that amphibians will move from an environment that is less than optimal. But I'm unaware of literature explaining that frogs will move away from water when they have "had their fill".

The link below provides an enormous amount of information.
Please pay special attention to the remarks made by jennewt and EdK, who are both contributors to the web site listed second...
http://forum.kingsnake.com/frog/messages/47736.html
http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/Spring_water.shtml

"Rainwater is often more similar to distilled water than tap water, so how would the animals cope naturally?"
This implies that rainwater is somehow superior or of higher quality than tap water. Perhaps 500 years ago rainwater was clean enough to drink, but today rainwater is responsible for acid rain, and contains particulate matter from combustion including diesel soot. And I have been disappointed that rainwater can also carry a common herbicide that can cause prostate cancer in men
Here is an article on atrazine, and how much of it can be found in rainwater...
http://www.sciencenews.org/20021102/fob1.asp
-----
...the oldest task in human history: to live on a piece of land without spoiling it."
Aldo Leopold (1938)

"Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
Calvin and Hobbes (Scientific Progress Goes 'Boink', 1991)

Hi Colchicine,
I am aware that many institutions use reconstituted solutions for they're amphibians, but I was only aware that this was only in either aquatic species, or larval phases where obviously the correct level of certain ions is absolutely paramount to many species well being. Also, when you quote how certain ions such as calcium are beneficial, if not essential to amphibians, was this not also referring to species in aquatic phases?

However, my answer to both these cases is that the question was on metamorphosed whites tree frogs (at least I assume it was) and I hope you can aggree that these require a solution with a higher water potential than the cells in the frogs body. If you don't agree, what do think would happen if you put a whites in a concentrated salt solution? Through my own intuition I assumed that these frogs will move out of water once they have replenished the optimum blood and cell solute concentration, otherwise they would quite simply either die or use other mechanisms (such as collecting and expelling excess bodily water) to keep the water balance at optimum levels. If this is correct (which I hope you would agree it is) then it is quite logical that the water could just be distilled, as exactly the same principles would apply.

Also, are you suggesting that freshly fallen rainwater will have a higher concentration of ions and impurities than processed and treated tapwater? Unless pollution levels are very high around you, I think it would be quite unlikely, at least here in England that isn't true. You could even try evaporating equal volumes of tapwater and rain water in a suitably shaped container to see this for yourself (although this does not take in dissolved gases into account) My comment wasn't meant to imply that rainwater is 'superior' to tapwater. I still can't see how it does. This comment was merely meant to back up my original argument, if you consider that most amphibians have evolved in the absence of modern day high level pollution, you're comment was rather irrelevant in context to the original question (we're talking about what ion concentrations frogs are adapted to, not whther they are adpated to modern levels of dissolved pollutants). I was not saying that you should use rainwater for captive frogs in case you misinterpreted my statement.

Anyway, I suppose since this is a hobbyist forum, rather than a scientific one, I should have just said how I have used distilled water for six years with my tee frogs and have had no problems (hence I probably appeared quite 'confident' in my post). And really just used my own knowledge to come up with a reason why.

One last thing colchicine, I thought it was common knowledge that tree frogs entered water when dehydrated, and come out again when rehydrated? Whilst I'm sure I could find some literature supporting this statement, I hope I don't have to go through the bother!

I'm quite weary of this argument now, but hope you can see what my original point was, and agree with it. I'm sorry for not sourcing everything I have written, but this is, like I have already said, a hobbysit forum, and I was simply responding to a simple question.

.
-----
Check Out My Albums

1.0 Ball Python
"Aragorn"

1.0 Kenyan Sand Boa
"Gimli"

0.1 Australian Cattle Dog/Pointer
"Kira"

Ok here it is. Im not sure if anyone is still reading this post but here. Ive noticed that a lot of people who keep amphibians and reptiles don't actually have a lot of formal education on the matter of keeping or biology of these animals. So here is why distilled water is bad for amphibians and all other living things for that matter. Distilled water is pure H2O, when it is boiled all trace minerals are eliminated from it, turning it into basically a water "sponge". Now when this water is introduced into the system of a living thing basically it leaches out all of the trace minerals in the organism and in the long run can cause severe mineral deficiency. Have you ever seen people drinking distilled water? A lot of the jugs in the store say not for human consumption on them. Hope that clears things up.
Jeff