fish and frogs?

[thewhites]

having built a small fish pond last spring we awoke this morning to find lots of activity in the pond with frogs hard at it and now several clumps of frog spawn. how the frogs found the pond we have no idea being in a large city! reading up it is said that the fish will eat the tadpoles when they develop. will they eat all of it or will some tadpoles fight to see another day? should we let nature take its course or move some of the frogspawn to a safe location?

any suggestions would be appreciated.

picture of resting visitor attached.

[alan_rymer]

Leave them, unless the pond is overstocked with fish and you r'e not feeding them, some will survive. Its not only the fish that eat them, some of the garden birds do too!.

[David FG]

In a large pond well-stocked with plants some tadpoles should survive. Why not do a 'belt and braces' job and move some of the spawn to a fish-free place leaving the rest to take its chance?

[gw4aurora]

My problem was the opposite in that the tadpoles as they got bigger were trying to eat the fish and also suffocating them. The goldfish were large fish but by shear numbers alone the tadpoles would swim inside the fishes mouths and gills.
The result was I gave the fish away. There is going to be many thousands of tadpoles this year again. Blackbirds and robins do eat some in fact the robins feed their young on them sometimes.Blackbirds will even eat the very small frogs. After the predation many tadpoles do survive to be adult frogs.

Chris.

[Johnny1]

I'd be very careful if I were you, I too have a small pond which some local frogs found to their liking, I left the frogspawn to hatch although the fish ate a few most survived. A couple of years later and you couldn't see the pond for frog spawn, I ended up taking gallons of it to the local ponds. I did this every year for several years but I'm still getting frogs spawning in my pond.

[David FG]

Another potential frog-related problem is that males can get rather over-excited at breeding time, and it is on record that they have been known to strangle fish (blind to the fact that a goldfish has almost no resemblance at all to a female frog.)