On Mar 18, 4:19*pm, Jake wrote:
On Sun, 18 Mar 2012 15:33:46 +0000, Spider wrote:

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.

Thanks. I've already got loads of frogs (and some newts with a death
wish). See my reply to Janet about something I've never encountered
before which is the massing of the babies and the moving of the jelly
to a ring around that mass.

I'm not thinking of thinning out but want to give them all a fighting
chance.

Meanwhile the cat's intrigued. He's spent hours today just sitting
beside the pond looking at them. I know he's sort of scared of frogs
and wonder if he realises what he's in for if a lot survive.

I've got two clumps of frogspawn so far. The first was laid at night
on top of my water plants in my fishpond. I transferred them to my
little fishless pond as I feared for their lives when they hatch and
they were rather exposed to predators in that position.

This afternoon I watched two frogs mating in my fishpond and they have
laid the second clump of spawn mostly submerged and seem to be hanging
around, to protect them maybe? Anyway I have left those to fend for
themselves and there are places where they can hide when they hatch.

So its all looking good, my four fish have done well over the winter,
there are small newts around and now frogspawn. Can't wait for them to
hatch. So what happens should I get masses of tiny frogs, or will most
of them be killed or just die?

What I thought were bats on my night CCTV have turned out to be large
moths which trigger the motion detector.

Doug.