Spring blooms, tulips rise, and frogs emerge. Equally inevitable as it is natural, they arrive near your ponds. After observing them maybe you've been entranced and are thinking, "What does a frog eat?"
Here we will tell you about what can frog eat at home and in the wild. Frogs are opportunistic ambush predators that feed on a wide variety of insects, depending on their size, habitat, and availability. Here are foods that frogs can eat:
Flies are a common part of the frogs' diet and an easy answer to what do small frogs eat. No matter the size or the developmental cycle of the frog, they are skilled at hunting flying insects and make use of their long, sticky tongues to capture flies.
Whether houseflies, fruit flies, or crane flies, all of them serve as an excellent source of protein for frogs, and they are easily abundant in many environments including your home making them a readily available food source.
Mosquitoes are another common food source for frogs and a staple of what frog eats. You can't think of a frog and not imagine them eating flies and mosquitoes. Frogs play an important part in the ecosystem to play the role of mosquito population balancers in many different regions.
The vision of the frogs is primarily based on perceiving movement, so if the frogs aren't eating still mosquitoes just give it some time for the mosquito to move and the frog will eradicate the mosquitoes.
Ants are found everywhere, even in your homes. If your home has been completely ant-free during the summer you know who to thank. The frogs feed on ants which may seem like a small amount of nutrients but ants are plentifully abundant in terrestrial environments.
You don't have to worry about the frogs when they are ant-terminating, some of them may have a strong bite or sting but they're nothing that the frogs cannot handle. If the frog is being overwhelmed, they can simply jump away from danger as well.
Have you ever been annoyed by the sounds of senseless and incessant chirping in the dead of the night preventing you to sleep? Well, say no more the frogs have heard and are coming to the rescue.
If you had some nights of peace and tranquility, frogs are the ones to thank as crickets are what frog eat in the dead of the night. They are easy to catch and are rich in protein making them a staple in the diet of many frog species.
When it comes to food, frogs don't discriminate. You may personally find the beetles adorable but to the frogs, food is food. Frogs consume various types of beetles, ranging from small ground beetles to larger species like ladybugs and even rhino beetles if the frogs are sufficiently large-sized.
Most beetles can fly which makes them prevalent however, their flight isn't a boon when it comes to facing frogs as they're not as nimble as flies and mosquitoes.
While frogs prefer wet and moist wetlands, that doesn't mean they aren't found in more arid habitats. If you live near such an area you will notice that the larger frogs can easily prey on the grasshoppers whilst relying on their stealth and ambush tactics.
Grasshoppers may be able to jump 50 times its height but the tongue of the frogs can uncoil faster than the grasshoppers can react and they provide a substantial meal so the frog may be thanking their lucky stars.
Mealworms are promptly called so because they are commonly found in grains and flour supplies in the kitchen while waxworms are found near beehives. These pests are an excellent delicacy for frogs, and they act as a farmer's friend by getting rid of the mealworms that feed on their commercial crops.
Wax worms feed on the wax needed to construct beehives which is a huge headache for bee farmers and are considered a pest. You can easily buy and then raise them in your homes for an easy frog food supply.
If you find these oddy buzzy white-colored light seekers annoying, the flying moth insects are also a part of a frog's diet but only sometimes. Moths are incredibly good at camouflage and avoid the areas near the ground.
Frogs' tongues may be agile but they can't snatch what they can't see, though a cleverly hidden moth in the wild isn't the same as a blissfully ignorant moth and woefully idling about near your lamps.
Butterflies are beautiful and fragile making them the perfect embodiment of feminity for the poets for centuries. And their metamorphosis transformation has also been a symbol of hope and change for women as they vie for freedom and inequality.
And yet, the fragility of the butterflies is never more obvious when they are beset by frogs with their agile tongues easily snatching them from the air to be engorged. No one wants the butterflies to be eaten so keep your frogs indoors if you don't want the butterflies' journey to be cut short.
Speaking of another food that we don't want frogs to feed on but they do all the same are honey bees. Honey bees are useful pollinators essential to the plant ecosystem, however frogs won't discriminate. But can't the bees simply sting the frog?
Depending on the species of the frog, the slimy exterior of the frog prevents the bees from being able to latch and sting onto the frog properly. This means frogs can easily feed on not only bees but wasps, yellow jackets and hornets as well.
Mice are also a part of the diet of large frog species such as Pacman and African bullfrogs. When young, these frogs will only feed on "pinkies" or relatively newborn mice. However, as they mature and become adults, the bigger frogs will also eat adult mice due to their strong jaws and a large mouth.
Whether you find it terrifying, you can't deny that frogs are fantastic natural pest controllers for being able to catch quick and nimble mice.
Many frog species eat cockroaches. Cockroaches are a part of the diet of various frogs, especially those that inhabit urban and suburban environments where cockroaches are abundant. They are a good source of protein and are relatively easy for frogs to catch due to their slow and deliberate movements.
Frogs often use their long, sticky tongues to capture cockroaches and other small insects. In some cases, frogs may also feed on cockroach nymphs or smaller species of cockroaches.
As we discussed above, frogs have a wide variety of diets when it comes to dining on insects owing to the sheer amount of diversity in the insect kingdom. Just like around human settlements, the frogs will continue to feast on insects but make no mistakes, the frogs are carnivores, not an insectivores.
Some of the food that frogs eat in the wild is discussed below.
In the wild frogs can come across a lot of arthropods which are not common in most urban areas such as mites, centipedes, and millipedes. And some species of frogs also eat even harsher arthropods such as scorpions by the African bullfrog and crabs by the crab-eating frog when they come across them.
It is their impressive ability to eat anything that allows them to not only thrive but have plentiful adaptations and specializations to suit any environment for surviving in the wild.
Aquatic frogs such as those found living near ponds and streams often prey on a wide variety of aquatic insects such as mayflies. Their ability to fly makes flies common everywhere and that's no exception for these particular insects.
Plus, mayflies rely heavily on movement and thus making it easy for frogs to perceive them on their movement-based vision which makes them a deliciously easy target.
Other aquatic insect-based diets for aquatic frogs include more water-dwelling insects such as water beetles, water striders, bloodworms, brine shrimp, blackworms, and aquatic larvae of various insects. Aquatic areas such as ponds are teeming with life which is why frogs generally stick to damp areas.
This is doubly true for aquatic frog species who do not even have to come out of their local homely pond to feed.
Larger frogs living in arid or desert habitats are also capable of preying on the flying locusts. While they may be hard to catch due to being high-flying, the sheer abundance of the locusts that fly in swarms means these small hard-to-catch insects provide a substantial meal even with just a few on the table.
While it may be difficult to catch flying locusts, while they're on the grounds, they are easy to catch due to having weaker jumps than grasshoppers due to their overreliance on flight.
Frogs being opportunistic feeders, it should come as no surprise that frogs do also eat spiders. Spiders are part of the diet of many frog species and are commonly consumed as the frogs come across them.
Frogs are not particularly selective and their long, sticky tongues are equally effective at catching spiders. Since the spiders are often found in the same terrestrial environments as frogs, and their presence makes them a convenient and sometimes essential food source for these amphibians.
Frogs can prey on a wide variety of plant bugs, true bugs, and hoppers, including aphids, mites, scales, thrips, whiteflies, leafhoppers, and planthoppers, etc. These bugs and insects can pose no threats to frogs and frogs will happily gorge them all.
In fact, frogs do not have instincts for not eating food, some frogs have been noted to eat so much that they become incapable of walking afterward and might even kill themselves through overeating if they do not vomit.
Certain large frog species such as giant frogs, tree frogs, goliath frogs, pacman frogs, and bullfrogs can even consume small vertebrate prey such as mice, birds, reptiles, and even smaller mammals if they come across them in the wild.
These frogs have strong powerful jaws and the ability to open very wide to swallow larger prey whole. These frogs may not eat frequently but being larger means they need a larger food source.
In more tropical regions, termites can also come swarming out of trees after all the eggs and larvae hatch. Unlike carpenter bees and ants, these termites do not necessarily just live in trees but instead feed on them making trees a consumptive and diminishing resource for termites rather than permanent accommodations of the carpenter insects.
Thus, as the termites come swarming in search of new trees, frogs easily consume termites with glee.
In aquatic and other damp areas residing frog species have a high chance of coming across the soft-bodied mollusks. These frogs are capable of eating mollusks, i.e. snails and slugs.
While the slugs are completely soft, snails often have shells, which the frogs can crush with their strong jaws before gaining access to the softer tissues inside. Mollusks are also found in sufficiently abundant numbers that the frogs had no reason to not evolve to eat.
Frogs often feed on soft-bodied worms without discrimination regardless of whether they are ecosystem-beneficial worms such as earthworms, blackworms, and redworms or other pesty soft-bodies such as bloodworms, hornworms, mealworms, waxworms, etc.
The worm-based delicacies are soft, easy to digest, and a great source of protein. They are also generally small enough that it prevents the risk of frogs from damaging their small intestinal tract.
Speaking of soft slow slow-moving delicacies, another such delicacy is the caterpillars. Frogs also have no qualms about eating caterpillars, while the worms could be buried underground, the caterpillars are easily found above the ground on plants and are easy to hunt when they are busy feasting on juicy leaves.
Frogs will eat any non-venomous and non-poisonous caterpillars. Frogs also have good memory such that if they get sick from any poisonous caterpillars, they will vomit and avoid it in the future.
The ability of dragonflies and damselflies to fly huge distances makes them common everywhere just like the houseflies and plenty of other insects in the fly family and dragonflies and damselflies are no exception.
Their powerful wings might make it difficult for frogs to catch them but that doesn't stop them from trying. Plus their constant movement makes it easy for frogs to perceive them making them an irresistible and delicious treat.
Despite their wildly successful and varied diet, there are still foods that frogs cannot eat. We will discuss some of the frog-adverse foods below.
I'm sure you've asked yourself, "Do frogs eat grass?" Despite most of the frogs living near wetlands and grasslands and some frogs even being named grass frogs, frogs are purely carnivorous and do not eat grass.
Those frogs are called leaf frogs due to their leafy green skin camouflage. Most frogs lack the teeth needed to chew through grass and those that do only use their teeth to eat, mollusks, arthropods, and vertebrates.
Frogs cannot thrive on fruits and vegetables. Frogs haven't evolved to consume vegetarian foods in the first place. It is difficult as it is to feed them non-living stationary food but even if they do consume it, it generally causes severe malnutrition.
Frogs need a lot of proteins and nutrients such as zinc, folic acid, calcium, vitamin A, etc to ward off any nutritional diseases all of which are naturally found in a wide range of insects but not in plant matter.
Similar to plant matter vegetarian foods such as fruits and vegetables, human foods are unfit for consumption. You may think that frogs are carnivores so it should be simple enough to feed them any meat, raw or cooked right?
Wrong because not only will frogs find them nutritionally deficient due to being unable to metabolize fundamentally different nutrients, they will also suffer from food poisoning and intestinal blockages from deviating from their natural diet.
The best foods for baby froglets if you are considering buying and owning a frog are bloodworms, wingless fruit flies, brine shrimp, pinhead crickets, and red worms. All of them can be easily found around your home or brought from the store. Plus, they are small in size and prevents risking bursting the intestinal tracts of the frogs.
Wondering what tadpoles eat? Tadpoles eat algae in the ponds they grow in. As they grow, they feed on algae plants, and small insects with some aquatic frog tadpoles even eating small fish. Tadpoles of some frog species may exhibit cannibalistic behavior when food resources are scarce and eat smaller tadpoles to gain a competitive advantage.
Frogs actually breathe through their skins despite having lungs. Their skin membrane is very thin which allows oxygen to pass through when the frog is underwater. They can also breathe through the lining of their mouths. They only use their lungs when they need to top up their oxygen levels.
It depends on the species and level of activity. A frog can stay underwater for anywhere between a few minutes to a few months. A frog that's moving a lot may not get enough oxygen through its skin so it will have to surface for air. However, a hibernating frog may stay buried in the mud at the bottom of a pond for the whole winter.
There is scientifically collaborated evidence that frogs have been around and roamed the Earth for more than 250 million years, which is even older than the fossils of first true dinosaurs.
Frogs despite generally requiring most, damp or humid environments and primarily living in wetlands as terrestrial or aquatic frogs do not drink water. Instead of drinking water conventionally like most vertebrates do, frogs absorb the water through their skin to stay hydrated.
Frogs were one of the first land animals to have evolved vocal cords. Frogs use their vocal cords to make noises to attract mates. Some male frog species have vocal sacs, pouches of skin that fill with air that can balloon up and resonate sounds that can be heard from a mile away.
Frogs have bulging eyes that allow them to see to the front, sides, and even partially behind them. Did I also mention that frogs have excellent night vision and are very sensitive to movement, making them excellent night hunters?
