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Allotment Articles1.
Allotment Articles 2.
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Frogs And Your
Pond
In the spring is you will probably start finding that your pond is home to an ever-increasing number of frogs. As the mating time approaches all the frogs in your garden and beyond will converge on your fish pond and start a noisy mating ritual filling the pond with their eggs in the familiar frog spawn jelly that we all played with as children.
Fish will start to become more active with the warmer weather and some of the eggs will be eaten, but many will survive to quickly hatch into tadpoles. Again the larger fish will not miss the opportunity for some live food but their vast numbers ensure the survival of a large number of tadpoles. Some of the tadpoles become carnivorous and start eating their brothers and sisters. These develop particularly fast into small frogs. The normal tadpoles will clean up the pond eating all the decaying rubbish on the bottom of the pond and any uneaten fish food, but they will also eat some of the plant life stripping the leaves off the emerging foliage.
The plants won't really suffer as the tadpoles only remain for a few weeks until they develop into small frogs and leave the pond in a search for slugs and insects. A large number of small frogs will survive the developmental process of metamorphosis from eggs to tadpoles to frogs and return to the pond in future years to mate and continue the generations.
Frogs are very good for the pond and garden in may ways, but the adult frogs are sometimes considered a nuisance for those who don't like them and some fish keepers mistakenly believe that they kill fish. It is true that during mating time a male frog will grab anything it can in the hopes that it is a female frog, but a healthy fish is far faster and more agile than a frog.
So it seems likely, that if a frog is found clutching a dead fish, that the fish was either already dead, or was sluggish and ill so would probably have died anyway. If you want to encourage frogs into your pond, plant lots of leaf cover around it and provide a shallow access point to the water so that they can easily climb out.
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