On 18/03/2012 13:51, Jake wrote:
Yesterday there were 11 distinct clumps of frog spawn in the pond and
I could see a fair few of the little luvvies inside wriggling a bit so
was expecting them to hatch over the coming week or so.

By this morning, though, the whole lot had hatched in one go and
they've somehow merged into two masses. The empty eggs have formed
themselves into two circles of gooey stuff around the two lots of
wrigglers. I can't see even a single unhatched one though there may be
some underneath the masses.

I've never known everything to happen all at once like this. Usually I
just leave them to their own devices but I'm now wondering if the pond
will sustain them all - I gave it a real clear out last year so
there's not that much for them to feed on.

I know some people use fish food and was wondering if there's a "best
type" to use and when I ought to start putting some in. There are no
fish in the pond.

I'm also wondering whether I should somehow break up the larger of the
two masses which is well over a foot in diameter (the smaller one is
about 6 inches) and is really a "solid" mass of babies, maybe by
twirling a stick around in the mass to give the ones in the middle a
chance to get out.

Any ideas welcome!

Cheers, Jake
=======================================
Urgling happily from the dryer end of Swansea Bay.



Congratulations! Hope you get lots of froggie friends to eat your molluscs.
As Janet says, they live off the very nutritious jelly that surrounds
them. As they get bigger, they will start to eat small pond critters
and drowned flies. I believe they also eat a certain amount of plant
matter. If you don't have pond plants (or if you do but you don't want
them eaten), try floating some lettuce leaf and see if they nibble on
that. I'm also fairly sure that, as they develop, they eat other
taddies, so you will find that a) there is enough food, and b)you won't
need to thin them out.

--
Spider
from high ground in SE London
gardening on clay