Bullfrogs eating fish.

[In2deep]

My fish keep disappearing they are not to big yet Im just wondering if the four BullFrogs I have are eating them. Can frogs catch fish underwater?

I set up a 55 gallon tank in my garage to hold the new koi until they get bigger.

I has also thinking about making a floating cage with 1/4 square wire to float in the pond until the fish get bigger.

 

[Event Horizon]

I would think a frog would eat most anything.

I know someone with a pond, where a frog ate a bird! I did not believe this but she showed me a picture of them both dead. The frog got the bird part way down, and I guess it got stuck. I would not have believed it if I did not see the picture.

I have made some small cages from pvc pipe and small plastic netting. I used them to keep my fish away from some plants.

Here is a video of a green frog in my pond eating a wasp.

 

[capewind]

I like baby fish, so all of last year as we found frogs, they were evicted a couple miles down the road ... How big are you fish? For the frog you are holding, a 4-5" fish would still be fair game...

 

[Fishylove]

Oh most certainly yes, bullfrogs will eat fish! That and anything else they can fit in their mouth! I let the smaller frogs stay, but the big ones?! They gotta go! Lol.

 

[fishin4cars]

Bullfrogs are very much a threat to small fish. 6" or less would be considered a meal. four adult Bullfrogs in a pond could be a recipe for disaster. But at the same time, a frog is not going to waste a lot of energy to get a meal, if there are a lot of insects in the area a single goldfish would be enough food to hold a bull frog for two or three weeks. You state that the fish keep disappearing. are they disappearing all at once or one here one there. If multiple fish are disappearing at the same time I would be more suspecting that there is a fish eating bird in the area.

 

[Carolyn22]

Bullfrogs will most definitely eat your smaller fish.

DH and I use bullfrog tads to keep the koi fry at a minimum. Over the years, we had exhausted all avenues in trying to find good homes for the fry. Every year, DH and I would have 50-60 koi fry that we had nowhere to put them and it is very difficult to catch them. So, in essence, we use bullfrog tads to control the koi fry.

 

[Waterbug]

I assumed bullfrogs didn't eat fish. I'd never seen any frog hunting underwater and they don't seem set up to be very good at it.

But I wasn't sure so I did some research. Many websites said they do eat fish. But to me these sites seemed to want to tell an interesting story more than convey info, so I kept going. Luckily there've been many studies done. Here's one done on Vancouver Island. To me this was much more interesting.

The sample was about 5,075 American Bullfrogs over 5 years. 473 stomachs were empty and removed from most of the results, which to me doesn't seem right. I don't know what their thinking was exactly. But still 4,602 frogs is a lot.

2.8% of the frogs had fish in their stomachs. That's 129 frogs out of 4602. If you include the 473 empty stomachs, which I would, it drops to 2.5% of frogs.

Where it gets interesting (to me) is that it varied from site to site. At more than 70% of sites no frogs contained any type of fish. Not sure if this means fish were available at all sites or bullfrogs taught each other how to catch fish and will learn to speak in the future and ultimately hunt humans, Planet of the Frogs. My assumption is there was some opportunist reason like water being shallow enough that fish were breaking the surface, but that's a pure guess on my part.

Clearly bullfrogs can eat fish. But to me "can" and "do" are a bit different and everyone would have their own opinion. I personally would say bullfrogs are not very good at eating fish, although possible. I doubt bullfrogs are chasing down fish, but maybe some future study would show they do. None of these studies showed how the fish are being caught.

For a backyard pond I would think it's even less likely a bullfrog would eat any fish and extremely unlikely they could eat all fish in a pond. But that's only my opinion.

 

[SE18]

no fish in my canal, just frogs which I love to watch (although they don't do too much unless a treat flies by). I'm trying to finish mortaring the stones in the aqueduct in the area where the frogs sit so I don't disturb them when the weather warms enough for them to come out.

 

[capewind]

Studies are wonderful, but they are also subjective based on the particular environment. I found this particular study a good read:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...9175011&uid=3739256&uid=60&sid=21101872116221

It notes multi comments of crawfish being a primary staple, amongst other critters, but specificially on the first page notes Dyche (1914) examined the contents of 30 frogs from a hatchery in Kansas ... 14 of the frogs had comsumed 32 fish, than a variety of other contents were also listed. I especially find it interesting, that nearly half of the collected frogs not only ate A FISH, but it was able to catch more than one... that is more than a fluke in my view. To me, it sounds like 14 frogs found a BUFFET,,, aka an oppurtunity.

From the prospective of us all being pond owners, I think the main topic should be IS there oppurtunity???

I know my backyard (outside of my fenced in area) contains a wonderful, diet rich area, that would be a heaven to any bullfrog, yet in the warmer weather, it is a daily exercise to evict these buggers from our pond. They must find something attractive about our pond, more so than the bugs and water, as both are in abundance out back.

 

[Fishylove]

As I said before, I let the smaller frogs stay because they don't seem as interested in the fish. The larger ones however cannot stay because I've seen them eat my fish. I removed the culprit and let him go in a pond thats about a city block away from us, THAT was a big mistake I'm my part, because he came back and promptly ate another one Actually I thought maybe him finding his way back to my little pond was a fluke or possibly ..... It was a different giant frog lol..... So I took him back to the same pond. Again, a week later here he was again!! So NOW they are bigger than what can fit in my closed hand they are promply removed and released miles away. Lets hope they're not like one of those dogs that find their way back home from states away!! Hah!

 

[capewind]

We had one that to me was huge (will try to remember to get the pics of it from hubs computer tonight). Kids wanted to see if it would really eat fish. So before eviction, we left it in a tote overnight, with a couple inches of water and a few comets. It did eat them, but for the purposes of this discussion, it doesnt prove anything. These comets were only 2-3" and contained to a tote. That is a bit more oppurtunity then we are talking about here.

I'm doubting our daily tennants are the same frogs getting back here so fast, but like I already posted, out backyard is a heaven for them. I understand they can be territorial, so what I want to know is how do they know so fast that there is a new vacancy??? LOL.

 

[SE18]

As I said before, I let the smaller frogs stay because they don't seem as interested in the fish. The larger ones however cannot stay because I've seen them eat my fish. I removed the culprit and let him go in a pond thats about a city block away from us, THAT was a big mistake I'm my part, because he came back and promptly ate another one Actually I thought maybe him finding his way back to my little pond was a fluke or possibly ..... It was a different giant frog lol..... So I took him back to the same pond. Again, a week later here he was again!! So NOW they are bigger than what can fit in my closed hand they are promply removed and released miles away. Lets hope they're not like one of those dogs that find their way back home from states away!! Hah!

LOL, great story! Guess it would be hard to tag it to see if it really made its way back. A homey frog. LOL!

 

[sissy]

I found out a bull frog can also hug a fish to death .I had 2 and they went for a long truck ride

 

[HARO]

Mine flunked their driver's licence test! :nananananana:
John

 

[sissy]

mine didn't they rode shot gun .I caught the bull frog last fall before I got hold of him and he had a baby fish in his month .Caught him just as he grabbed it in the water fall area .I was watching the baby fish swim around and he just jumped from no where and he scooped him right up and I just grabbed him and I hate touching them but had no choice .I tried to see if I could get the baby but saw it was dead already .Not sure how he killed it so fast ,it was like a blink of the eye .He went for a ride right then and there :moped: .I knew there were more and caught 2 more after that one darker than the other .I hate bull frogs .They are on my hit list now ..