frogs with snails

[kanin]

Just wondering, have anyone on here having tried keeping snails with smaller frogs? They need aproxiamtly the same conditions and with a stable colony of woodlice and worms and the natural amount of small flies a snail tank attracts a frog might be able to find a stable source of food aswell doing some population control of these insects.

I'm not really thinking of putting a frog in any of my vivs but I was asked by a friend who had it in mind of however one could keep leaf frogs and snails in the same tank.

I couldnt really think of any reasons not to as long as he's sure that the frog wont try to eat the snails and as long as the tank is big enough for all residents to fullfill all their needs without bugging eachother to much.

[coyote]

How big are these frogs in relation to the snail that would be in the tank?

[kanin]

I think the frogs would be about 2-3 cm and I think it was fulicas or retics he had in mind

[Bumblebee]

Well personally I'm not sure if it would be such a good idea, cause as far as I understood from what you had written, the frogs would have to live off the various flies etc that is in the tank, would they not be feed anything else?
Im not so sure if the flies and so would be enough for the frogs to live on to remain healthy.

[malti]

I would think that they would supplement the frog's diet..see that he gets enough food

[kanin]

The frogs would be feed like normaly with small flies from the petshop- the part about the fruit flies was just me thinking loud about pros and cons of having the frogs in there. he's been keeping and breeding different species of frogs for a long while so I'm sure he wont let them starve or anything.

I'm not really a fan of keeping many different types of animals in one tank myself as there always can be complications where one animal hurts another or questions of how they would react to eachothers bacterial culture etc. I can understand thoose who are interested in larger natural rainforest terrariums with more or less authentic flora and fauna like my friend however. Cant say that i dont find a little intriging as I like the concept on natural rainforest habitat in my own snail tanks.

He's going to try adding two 10cm fulicas to one of his very large rainforrest terrariums where he allready has frogs and some other animals(not completly sure on what but i think it's some kind of herbivore invertbrate).
He told me he was going to keep me updated on how this goes and if the snails would show any signs of discomfort he would remove them.

I'll continuing posting updates of this experiment on in this thread for those who are interested.

[malti]

could u ask your friend to post pics?

[kanin]

I'll ask him and see if he's up to that- he's got some really nice setups

[malti]

its that I already was thinking about something like that, and it would be great

[kanin]

Got a little update earlier today;

He took the snails out of the tank today and put them in a tank of their own. No snail or frog was hurt but there where an incident where on of the smaller frogs had approached on of the fulicas and starting to pay very intense attention to the snails eyestalk wobbling up and down. Interpreting this as the frog was seeing the eyestalk as "food" and where preparing to attack it he removed the snails and put them in a spare viv he had. He had also some concern of what would happen however a snail would fall and land on a frog. Well. we've seen this discussion before with millipedes.

His conclusion; even though some invertebrates can go together and some amphibians and reptiles go well, snails probably should stick to themselves.

Edit: About pics, I told him there where a request for pics and he might log on here and post some if he got time for it.

[malti]

thx kanin that was interesting to know.

[coyote]

It's a good thing he saw what the frog was doing before it actually caused any harm.