I have red an article in the Koi Carp magazine yesterday about a frog attaching him/herself to the koi on a regular basis and thought, nonsense.

I came accros this letter on internet today:

"I went into the garden today and a frog had attached itself to the face of a Koi with it's 'hands' (pushed up to the elbows) embedded into the eye sockets of the fish, this could either be the frog trying to mate or possibly trying to keep warm (all the other frogs and toads huddle together on the bottom of the pond). I did manage to get it off the fish but I will have to wait until the morning to see if the Koi is still alive, and there is a high probability that it has damaged the sight of the fish ... I have allowed frogs and toads into my Koi pond but tomorrow they will find themselves homeless ... because removing the frogs arms from my Koi's eye sockets was worse than childbirth (I'm sorry if this is rather graphic) .... in my opinion they do not mix, amphibians also bring a lot of parasites and diseases."

"I think more pond owners should be aware of the downside to encouraging wildlife if they have expensive fish."

They do this apparently if there are no other frogs in the pond.

Have you encountered this?

My pond = no plants, no snails, no frogs, 2 gold fish and 15 koi.

Keeping koi in small shollow ponds are a risk as you are looking for trouble. The owners of small shallow ponds are also the ones that usually add plants to their ponds. The plants brings parasites, frogs and snails.

I have a friend in retreat that have very big problems with snails, the snails come from his veggie filter and end up in his settlement area. There are so many that they block up his prefilter every day.

Frogs...they always return to the pond where they where born to lay eggs. So to have even one frog in a pond is a potential problem.

The reason for the frog attaching it to the koi is because its trying to mate with the koi because theres no female frogs in the pond and its in the mating season. The particular frog ( i forgot what variety) locks its arms around the female until it has mated with the female....but seeing as the male can't finish its job you end with the frog attached to the kois head. This is quite common in some areas of the world. The koi usually gets damaged during this time as the frogs pushes its "fingers" into the kois eyes and the embrase it so tight that it sometimes prevent the koi from using its gills and so the koi dies.

Wayne

This interesting ... I have a lot of frogs that pester my ponds and up to now we only threw them out but I am also seriously considering more assassinations than evictions.

In my part of the world the frogs play an important role in controlling insect numbers but it is getting annoying now.

We syphon as many eggs off as we can but some do slip through in the veggie pond.

Unfortunately there are apparently no fish that eats the tadpoles or the eggs.

The Tench and the Bass will eat tadpoles but only as a last resort because they are bitter. I found this.

Quote :

I think that tadpoles are a last choice food item. The reason I say this is, I was doing some seminars at Bass Pro in Springfield about 3 years ago. The seminars were downstairs by the large tanks. The fish were fed during my seminar. Mixed in with the minnows were a few tadpoles. Every time one of the larger fish would eat a tadpole, it would immediately spit it back out. The tadpoles died from all the rough treatment and sank to the bottom of the tank. I noticed there were several others on the bottom of the tank from previous feeding sessions. I see lots of tadpoles in my rivers also but few crawfish. I guess the fish like the crawfish better.

When I introduced koi to my mud dam, there were hundreds of frogs. After a year, there were none. I believe if you add a few koi to your veggie pond with your goldfish, they will sort the frogs out or at least keep them to the minimum.

I will do that Paul. Thanks.

Hi Paul

Please send me some of your koi in my mud ponds from Sep to Des there is some times more frogs then koi and I dont talk about platannas, they are allways the most..........

Hi Collin, I have fairly big koi in my dam and they only get fed once a month because it is quite far out for me and a 4x4 trip up the mountain. They have to survive mainly on natural food and sort out the tadpoles before they get big.

I have also seen that koi don't worry too much about tadpoles if there are plenty of alternative food.

Photo of dam:

Hi Paul

So I take to good care of my koi then......... have to starve them a bit more

Nice looking mud pond you have there. The dimentions are ?

52 x 19 x 2 (approximately 2 Million liters)