Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I've thawed them to room temprature .. does anybody got any tips on how to get the frog to take it.
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2 firebelly toads (Ernie and Oscar)
1 american green tree frog (Booger)
1 four line/golden tree frog (Nugget)
1 Pacman frog (Atari)

Use a pair of tweezers and dangle it just in front of and below his mouth. This should cause a feeding response to grab the pink.

Ed

No good. guess he's just still a bit skidish inhis new home. Either that or he's really smart
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2 firebelly toads (Ernie and Oscar)
1 american green tree frog (Booger)
1 four line/golden tree frog (Nugget)
1 Pacman frog (Atari)

It would be better to not feed the pinkies at all. With as many different invertebrates are available, there is no reason to feed pinkies, especially since pinkies are little more than fat. They do not even has as much calcium in them as their bones have not formed. Some people choose to give pinks every once in a while, but I see no reason to, especialy since you can create a varied diet with the wide range of invertebrates that are available on the market today.
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Yahoo:surfandskimtx04
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

If you steal in hunger, I will kick you when you try. These stand for me. Name your god and bleed the freak. I'd like to see. How you all would bleed for me.-Alice In Chains

Actually house crickets contain 54% fat/kcal*, while commercial crickets contain 44% fat/kcal*, compared to 60% fat/kcal* for mealworms. Compared to a 1.5 gram pink which is 40% fat/kcal and an adult mouse (27 gram) which is 47% fat/kcal. Pinks do not take a jump in fat content until they are larger than 4 grams at which time they hit 60% fat/kcal which is no higher than mealworms.

The only low fat invertebrate that is commercially available are earthworms but a diet os solely earthworms has been linked to muscle diseases in anurans (see Modzelewski, E.H.; Culley, D.D. Jr.; 1974, Growth responses of the bull frog, Rana catesbiana, fed various live foods; Herpetologica, 30(4): 396-405)

* Donoghue, Susan; Langenberg, Julie, 1996, Nutrition, In Reptile Medicine and Surgery, edited by Mader, Douglas R., W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia

Ed

That is the purpose of a varied diet though. Nightcrawlers, crickets, very occasional meal/wax/superworms. And though the mealworms and crickets may have more fat, neither are quite as large as a mouse. I still have not heard of a frog developed obesity related problems from a diet of crickets and mealworms, though it is documented in anurans with fish and mice (Ceratophrys, Pyxicephalus).
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Yahoo:surfandskimtx04
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

If you steal in hunger, I will kick you when you try. These stand for me. Name your god and bleed the freak. I'd like to see. How you all would bleed for me.-Alice In Chains

Obesity tends to be more related to total calories consumed than just to fat. Amphibians are hard wired to eat as much as possible when offered to them and many keepers (not all) often feed too many calories.
If the food items have the same fat content per unit then the answer is that there are less kcals of one of the food items going into the frog for some reason. This just may be an artifact of the way crickets are fed but more another possible causative factor is that crickets unless they are held for at least 48 hours and fed a good diet are deficient in protien, fat, and some amino acids. If people are feeding out insects that they have just recieved from the store or in the mail then they are probably feeding out insects that are not nutritionally sufficient for the long-term welfare of the animal but this is somewhat buffered out by the feeding of other items.

As for the fish, many fish are significantly lower in fat, such as smelt which only contain 31% fat/kcal.

Insect diets (such as crickets) may also be insufficient in arginine and methionine (amino acids) as the levels of these two amino acids are barely sufficient for carnivore diets or to support growth in poultry. This may also be a limiting factor in problems with insect diets and horned frogs.

Ed

Interesting. Another problem with fish though is that most people are not going to be looking for the healthiest fish usually. Comets and rosies seem to be the first choice based on availability. By any chance, do you know of a significant effect on anurans from the thiaminase contained in some of the commonly fed Cyrpinidae (but of course not limited to Cyprinidae)? I know it can cause a lack of vitamin B in some snakes species when fed a diet heavy in comets/rosies/goldies etc. but am curious when it comes to frogs.
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Yahoo:surfandskimtx04
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

If you steal in hunger, I will kick you when you try. These stand for me. Name your god and bleed the freak. I'd like to see. How you all would bleed for me.-Alice In Chains

Here is how I understand it.
Live fish do (should) not have levels of thiaminase that affect thiamine levels in the tissues of the fish. Thiaminase should only be an issue with dead or frozen thawed uncooked fish (as cooking deactivates the thiaminase). All fish contain thiaminase and at death thiaminase is no longer regulated and proceeds to breakdown the thiamine in the fish. The longer the fish is dead the more thiamine is degraded. As herps have a relatively slow digestive rate this becomes more of a factor than in a mammal or bird who has a gut transit time measured in hours (but these are still susceptiable to thiamine deficiency when fed frozen/thawed fish). If you are feeding prekilled or frozen thawed fish you will need to supplement thiamine to the animal at least 1 hour prior to feeding the frozen/thawed fish. The thiamine supplement needs to be fed in a non-fish food item to prevent thiaminase from degrading the supplement.
In general, it is better to feed cool/cold water species or marine fish as they have a lower saturated fat content and a higher unsaturated fat content. Fish like goldfish have been implicated in fatty liver disease when fed as the majority of the diet in marine fish and possible other species (the nutritionist at work never made that clear). I am unaware of any information (anecdotal or otherwise) really implicating rosey reds (fat head minnows)in thiaminase problems when fed live to the animals.
Another concern is the additives that are often added to the aquariums containing feeder fish to reduce mortality there has been some anecdotal reports if copper toxicity in Pelochelys bibroni (or cantori; the initial id may have been wrong) from bioaccumulation from contaminated feeder fish.
Ed

In the diet study I mentioned above with the earthworms and the bullfrogs the frogs were fed either crickets, earthworms or fish (I think mosquito fish but I haven't read the paper in years) or a combination of the three. The only frogs to grow normally were the frogs fed either fish or all three food items. There are a couple of implications here;
1) the right fish (saturated fat issue) are a complete diet
2) that there are sufficient value in the fish to make up for the deficiencies in the other food items.

Ed

How long did the experiment last? I would be interested to see if there were any LONG term effects that appeared in the group fed Gambusia vs. the control group fed all three items.

As for rosies being implicated in the Thiaminase issue, several people that fed only rosey reds to Thamnophis eventually ended up with snakes that had Vitamin B deficiency. It was not a scientific trial, but I feel rather safe that it was the rosies that caused it as no other items were fed. Of course, others have never had problems with feeding rosies over the life span of their snakes. Pretty contradictory. As I heard: 1) all fish contain thiaminase, though some have less than others 2) it can be just as harmful in live fish as in dead 3) freezing makes the problem with thiaminase worse (not sure how that works, but that is the rumor floating around) 4) and lastly, the boiling the fish or heating it to a high temperature causes thiaminase to break down (which I can understand).
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Yahoo:surfandskimtx04
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

If you steal in hunger, I will kick you when you try. These stand for me. Name your god and bleed the freak. I'd like to see. How you all would bleed for me.-Alice In Chains

I'm not sure what you mean by "long term" but as I remember the article, the frogs were raised to market size. The point to remember is that nutritional disruptions have the highest probabilty of occuring before sexual maturity as opposed to after due to the rapidity of growth and the highest need for the various vitamins and minerals. It is very unlikey that the animal would then evidence problems if the diet remained consistant.

With the rosy reds were only live fish fed? Even recently dead fish can have a negative thiamine deficit. Many times when feeding garters people throw the fish into the bowl and come back later. These fish are often in poor shape and are thin, this often causes some of the fish to die either before or after offering the fish to the garter. These fish then consumed by the snake potentially leading to the problems observed. (I've known a lot of garter snake people who would feed the dead fish as well as the live fish). (see #2 below)

1) Yes all fish contain some thiaminase. As far as I can determine this is usually only a problem with dead fish (frozen/thawed is implicated the most often as during the freezing/thawing process the thiaminase in the tissues has more time to degrade the thiamine).

2) I cannot find any information supporting the live fish being a problem with thiaminase. Frye's Biomedical and Surgical Aspects of Reptile Husbandry specifically states " Most often, a deficency of thiamine is a result not of insufficient preformed or internally synthesized thiamine but, rather, the action of the lytic enzyme, thiaminase, which is present in certain dead fishes fed to animals, some clams and certain plants...." This is also echoed in Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry.
I do not doubt that they were fed a sole diet of rosey reds but I suspect there is a little more going on in the reported cases that is being missed.

3) see #1

Ed

mmmm strange, in many cultures people have eaten insects as the main source of meat and seemed to have thrived on that. In fact, I read many articles stating it is superior nutrionally than mammal meat.

Remember John the Baptist? He liked locusts.

I would think if insects have enough protein to sustain a person, they can also with frogs. I have to find some articles I had relating how insect protein in fact is superior to mammal meats.

Jade Fox

>Insect diets (such as crickets) may also be insufficient in >arginine and methionine (amino acids) as the levels of these >two amino acids are barely sufficient for carnivore diets or >to support growth in poultry. This may also be a limiting >factor in problems with insect diets and horned frogs.

Meat and protien are not analogous. Plants contain protien but are not meat. Yeast and bacteria contain protien but are not meat.
People eat plants for protien but some staple plants are also known to be deficient in certain amino acids and will not support growth when used as a sole diet. The deficency needs to be corrected through the addition of other items or other staple cereals.

Sustaining a person for a short time is not analogous to supplying a complete diet for a person.

The analysis of the deficiencies as I cited is through analysis of the insects.

I have no need to make up items to support belief statements.

Ed

that is one of the funniest things i have heard in a while. Where did you get that test? on most tests, the fat content of crickets is around 5-10%, protein 15-30% and moisture 35-45%. even for tests on mealworms the fat is only at like 15-25%. your source doesn't sound very reliable to me.
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0.1 "Tremper" looking Albino Leopard gecko (Lex)
0.0.1 tiger crested gecko (peachs)
1.1 Feral cats that we adopted (Fuzzy, and Bear)

My image Gallery

np
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0.1 "Tremper" looking Albino Leopard gecko (Lex)
0.0.1 tiger crested gecko (peachs)
1.1 Feral cats that we adopted (Fuzzy, and Bear)

My image Gallery

Donoghue, Susan; Langenberg, Julie, 1996, Nutrition, In Reptile Medicine and Surgery, edited by Mader, Douglas R., W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia

Ed

the reason why i said your reference is i didn't pay attention to the Kcal part, sounds normal for a measure in Kcal. I thought the 44% part was it was made up of 44% fat. The way i was thinking your test was done by is the way that is used most often used in testing for protein, fat, calcium, and phosphorus. The % total of that subject, not the Kcal.
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0.1 "Tremper" looking Albino Leopard gecko (Lex)
0.0.1 tiger crested gecko (peachs)
1.1 Feral cats that we adopted (Fuzzy, and Bear)

My image Gallery

As I understood it when I spoke to the one of the authors these numbers are corrected for total digestiable calories. Many of the analysis that are commonly availabe are the result of simple bomb calorimitry and contain the energy contained in indigestiable or relatively indigestiable items such as hair or chitin).

Ed

Actually according to all of my readings, crickets are the lowest in fat percentages.

There is NO WAY a mouse is going to be similar to a cricket fat content. Pet frogs can do without the mice. period.

An example is the website: http://www.grubco.com/Nutritional_Information.cfm

Whereas crickets have 6.01% fat and 21.32% protein

Mealworms have 12.72% fat and 20.27% protein.

Some people eat insects too (have done so throughout history) and all nutritional analyses also refect similar figures. Crickets also are naturally low in cholesterol

Madame Jade Fox

That is true if you run them through a straight bomb calorimiter and do not take into consideration that there are indigestiable matter.
When you work the numbers based on kcals of usable energy as I cited then they are very comparable.
Grubco numbers are from a straight bomb calorimiter run.

Ed

As this is not born out in the published literature, the required diet for crickets nor their subsequent analyzed content.

House crickets contain 54% fat/kcal*, while commercial crickets contain 44% fat/kcal*, compared to 60% fat/kcal* for mealworms. This is only an average of 20% difference from mealworms. So the claim that crickets are low in cholesterol because they are low in fat is wrong. (citation below)

Donoghue, Susan; Langenberg, Julie, 1996, Nutrition, In Reptile Medicine and Surgery, edited by Mader, Douglas R., W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia

Also in Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry (2001), crickets are cited as being high in saturated fats which can contribute to excessive levels cholesterol resulting in corneal lipodosis.

As I mentioned above the common listings are not corrected for indigestiable or relatively indigestiable material contained in the feeder insects. When these corrections are included a very different picture of the nutritional quality of the insect appears.

Ed

In case you missed the posts below

You can think what you like as I said above there are still people that believe the earth is flat and that man never landed on the moon.

Please the following carefully as I would not want you to miss any of the important points.

One of the problems with information of websites is that if there is no credible reference as to where the information originally came from it needs to be treated with a grain of salt. Information often gets placed on multiple sites despite being erroneous, outdated or unsubstantiated. (By the way you have provided a great example of the recycling of outdated and/or incorrect information. Consequently as you continue to choose to ignore it, I once again recommend Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry to you. You can order it directly from Krieger Press, ZooBook Sales or even Amazon.com. It will save you a lot of problems with misdiagnosis in the future).

I was not the person to get huffy. You decided to attack me personally when I questioned the information I knew to be wrong (to which you are still clinging).

Okay let us rehash this the thread from below here, the problem started when you provided a definative diagnosis on the sudden death of a bullfrog. You stated with great authority that the cause of death was probably due to parasitic infections with no other possible causes of death listed as an option. When I pointed out the other potential multiple causes of death, with the statement that a necropsy was required to be sure of the cause of death you then amended your diagnosis to include the possibility of a bacterial infection while still ignoring the possibility of fungal, protozoal, viral or an impaction as other potential sudden causes of death. On to the subject of bacteria, your first reference citing the infectious agent of "spring disease" was BACTERIUM RANICIDA which does not/did not ever exist. So in the next attempt to prove your point you mentioned BACTERIA ranacida, which also does not exist. Finally you hit on BACILLUS ranacida which does not exist under this name anymore (an indication of outdated information) as it has since been discovered that this was actually A. hydrophilia. When this was pointed out to you and "spring disease" was pointed out to be most likely be red leg you have responded with several belief statements and continued to attack my credibility. (You also then stated that this was for exotic frogs and have not clarified my questions on spring disease and "exotic" frogs.) I provided a sample of my credentials and you obviously made no attempt to prove or disprove my credentials (depsite the references being available on the web. A google search of Kowalski, Reptiles would pull all of the Reptiles references up) but went on to continue to attack me personally. This is very often the refuge of the ignorant, who when challenged change the subject or attempt to misdirect the focus.

Despite your assertions to the contrary I have never claimed to be a vet nor have I (unlike you) provided definative diagnosis for problems. (You are aware that you are practicing medicine whenever you make one of your definative diagnosis (such as the previous it died from parasite....). Pretty odd behavior for someone who makes the claim to not be a "reptile expert" or to be a vet that you continue to supply medical information (often erroneous) and lots of information you defend as if you were an expert. Okay you are not an expert on Reptiles but since you did not mention amphibians does this mean you are an expert on amphibians?)(IN case you ignored it earlier, I once again recommend Amphibian Medicine and Captive Husbandry and on second thought a copy of the Biology of Amphibians wouldn't hurt anything except a bunch of your preconcieved notions too much).

Here is a list of the "glorious" articles you requested (at least the ones I remembered off the top of my head). Don't forget I have been keeping/working with multiple species of anurans for almost 30 years. At work, I work/worked with many of the more common species as well as Atelopus zeteki and Bufo baxteri. You were the one that tried to say I didn't know what I was talking about here. I didn't bring up any of my credentials until you thought you could discredit me as shown by the title of one of your posts.
By the way you have still not supplied any credentials to uphold your position on any of these topics.

http://www.caudata.org/cc/species/Siren/S_intermedia.shtml
http://www.caudata.org/cc/species/Ambystoma/A_tigrinum.shtml (coauthored)
In press, Spindly Leg, Journal of the Art of Amphibian Husbandry (tentative publication date May 2004)
In Press, Amphibian Nutrition, Journal of the Art of Amphibian Husbandry (tentative publication date May 2004)
In Press, Gutloading, what is it really, Reptiles Magazine (Tentative publication date, June 2004)
"Refeeding Syndrome" - Terrapin Tales, June, 2002
Seal Salamander (Desmognathus monticola) Husbandry and Captive Maintenance, Reptiles v7.7 (7/99)
Captive Care and Maintenance of Slimy Salamanders, Reptiles v10.6 (6/02)
Keep Your Marbles, Reptiles, v9.6 (6/01)
Cynops ensicauda, The Japanese Swordtail Newt, Reptilia, No 29
Care and Maintenance in Captivity of Rio Cauca Caecilians Typhlonectes natans, Reptilia, No 17
MBD (written for the frognet.org FFAQ)http://www.tracyhicks.com/MBD.htm 2003
Speaker for IAD (International Amphibian Day) 2002, Caecilian husbandry
Speaker for International Amphibian Day 2004, Aquatic Amphibian Husbandry
Cycling an Aquarium for Aquatic Animals, 2001 http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/cyclingEDK.shtml
Temperatures for newly imported newts, 2001, http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/tempEDK.shtml
Bloat in newts (also applies to anurans and caecilians), 2001, http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/bloatEDK.shtml
Euthanasia for Amphibians, 2002, http://www.caudata.org/cc/articles/euthanasia.shtml

Ed

take the pinkie by the tail with tweezers and wiggle it in front of him.i always fed mine live food-gold fish,toads,frogs,pinkies then he started eating adult mice that was sweet.do not keep two together mine at the other one and they were almost the same size.

Sound like a well balanced diet...hahahaha.
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Andy Maddox
AIM: SurfAndSkimTx04
MSN: Poloboy32486@hotmail.com
Yahoo:surfandskimtx04
Houston Herp Key
The Reptizone

If you steal in hunger, I will kick you when you try. These stand for me. Name your god and bleed the freak. I'd like to see. How you all would bleed for me.-Alice In Chains