How to Raise Tadpoles into Frogs

  1. If you find tadpoles in a situation where they are likely to do just fine on their own, leave them there.  But if you find them in water that is rapidly drying up and they don’t even have legs yet, you can capture them and save them with these procedures.
  2. If the tadpoles have feathery things around their necks (external gills), they are salamander tadpoles and cannot be raised using these instructions because they eat only live bugs.  These instructions are only for frog and toad tadpoles.
  3. Keep the tadpoles in clean but untreated well water, lake or river water, or distilled water.  If you only have tap water containing chlorine or chloramine, put it through an activated carbon filter or boil it for 20 minutes and let cool.   
  4. Use a translucent plastic tub with only an inch or two of water in it.  If the water is too deep, it won’t have as much oxygen in it.
  5. Set it in a window in a room where you don’t use the lights at night (so the tadpoles have a natural photoperiod) or you can keep it outside with a sturdy cage over it to keep out raccoons or other predators.  Try for a situation with fairly natural temperatures.
  6. If you can find green algae in a pond, try feeding a bit of this to the tadpoles.
  7. Otherwise, take a fresh piece of red or green leaf lettuce (not iceberg lettuce) and cook it in boiling water for 15 minutes.  Lift it out carefully and put it into the tub of water with the tadpoles.  They might not eat it right away, especially when they are small.
  8. When the water gets dirty (which can be daily or weekly, depending on the density of tadpoles in the tub), put clean water in a different tub, transfer the lettuce leaf or cook a new one, then pour the dirty water tub out through a strainer to capture the tadpoles and quickly dump them into the clean water.
  9. If you are raising treefrogs indoors: When the tadpoles’ back legs get large, be sure to put a tight-fitting screen or cheesecloth cover over the tub.  Once they get their front legs, they can climb up the sides of the tub and escape, and then they are likely to die if they are inside a house (too dry).
  10. By the time they have large back legs, you should start feeding them dead earthworms in addition to boiled lettuce.  Dig up a couple earthworms, drop them into boiling water to kill them quickly, then remove them to cold water quickly (you don’t want to cook them) and add them to the tadpole tub.  The tadpoles often let the worms sit awhile before they start eating them.
  11. When they get their front legs, you should add a clean rock or two to the tub which is large enough to stick up out of the water.  The baby frogs or toads will start climbing out of the water onto the rocks.  At this point they no longer have gills to breathe underwater (although they can breathe through their skin).  At this point they also stop eating.
  12. If you are raising treefrogs: Find a place in your garden where there is shade and small bugs (like aphids) to eat.  Put out a tub with water and rocks and a slanted board to help them climb out when they are ready.  Put a milk crate over the top of the tub with a brick on top to keep them safe from predators.  Every day check your indoor tadpole tub and use a fish net to capture the ones with front legs.  Put them in a jar and bring them out to put into the garden tub.  Within a few days they will climb out and start their life as frogs.
  13. If you are raising other kinds of frogs, you should let them go in a pond when they get front legs.  If you are raising toad tadpoles, you can follow the instructions in #12 but make it really easy for them to climb out (use a short tub with a slanted board on both the inside and the outside) since they don’t have sticky toes like treefrogs.
  14. For my treefrogs, it took more than a month for the first one to get 4 legs and more than 2 months for the last one to get 4 legs, even though they were all the same age. 
  15. I read online that they need iodine in the water (to form the hormone thyroxine) in order to undergo metamorphosis, so I added a few granules of Kombu seaweed every time I changed the water.
  16. Other factors that speed up metamorphosis include warmer water, shallower water, denser population of tadpoles, and less food.  However, in excess, these factors can also kill them.