How to Care for Frogs

Video Transcript

"Hi. My name's Tim Cole. I'm with the Austin Reptile Service. I've been keeping reptiles and amphibians for over 40 years and we're here to talk about keeping frogs. Since there's lots of different frogs available to keep for pets you want to keep in mind how much space you've got, what kind of tank set up you want to do. Some frogs are purely aquatic like the African claw frogs or Suriname toads. Some frogs are arboreal like tree frogs. So you want to set them up in a vertical cage. A lot of frogs spend most of their time on the ground like African pixie frogs, horned frogs, bull frogs, fire belly toads. All of these spend time on the ground. So it all depends on what kind of set up you want to do. Some of them are perfectly happy with the dry set up and a water bowl. Some of them need moist sub-stories to burrow into. Some of them might eat food that's difficult to come by. But for the most part most frogs will eat anything they can get in their mouths. Crickets are certainly a good source for frog food and you want to supplement crickets with calcium. Bullfrogs get large. That may not be the way to go. American bullfrogs can get that big and need a lot of space but on the other hand the African bullfrog which we just have pictures of is not that big of a frog as far as needing space are not jumpers so they don't need a big cage. All frogs are going to eat live insects or live prey. The African pixie frogs and the horned frogs, bullfrogs will all eat rodents and the rodents don't even have to be alive. We feed frozen rodents to our African bullfrog and our horned frogs. They all eat thawed out frozen rodents."