What Do Tadpoles & Pollywogs Eat?

Tadpoles and pollywogs are baby amphibians.

Tadpoles and pollywogs are immature amphibians who live fully in the water. As they grow, they turn into frogs, newts, salamanders or toads by developing legs and lungs and emerging from the water.

Plants

Tadpoles and pollywogs are generally herbivorous, subsisting on algae and pond weed. Algae are photosynthetic water organisms that vary widely in location and size. Tadpoles and pollywogs eat a wide variety of algae forms ranging from small but multicelled to microscopic and single-celled. They also eat pond weeds.

Detritus

A minority of tadpoles and pollywogs are omnivores who eat an aquatic food source called detritus. The Marine Education Society of Australia defines detritus as "bacteria and the remains of finely chopped up algae and decaying fragments of animals, as well as countless numbers of stranded microscopic, one-celled green plants that are called diatoms."

Pet Food

If you keep tadpoles as a pet, you can feed them fish flakes, available at most pet stores. Some pet stores sell specific tadpole food. Be sure to keep the water clean from any food the tadpole does not eat.

References

• Season of Spring: Frogspawn, Tadpoles and Frogs
• Smithsonian Museum of Natural History: Algae Research
• MESA: Life on Australian Seashores
• Journal of Herpetology: Altitudinal Variation in Growth and Development Rates of Tadpoles of Litoria chloris and Litoria pearsoniana in Southeast Queensland, Australia