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2025.09.09

tadpoles

I went fishing on Saturday at lower seletar reservoir. Besides catching fish, we also collected some tadpoles from the drain.

I brought them home in a water bottle with some algae for food. I think there were a lot of babies that had just hatched mixed inside the algae. I did not notice them until I got home.

The contents of the bottle was poured into a plastic insect/fish box. The water was very dirty with mosquito larvae and sediments. I wanted to transfer the more developed tadpoles to cleaner water and seperate them from the many young tadpoles because a smaller population will be easier to handle and I do not need to change the water so frequently.

I did not collect much water on the day I collected the tadpoles because I was planning to use tap water for them. After doing some research, I realized tap water contains small amounts of chlorine and chloramine. It is fine for human consumption but can cause problems with the sensitive skin of the tadpoles. I planned to go to a nearby pond to collect water the next morning, but it was raining, so I decided to just use a bucket to collect water from the rain. The rain water should sit indoors to warm for a while before introducing the tadpoles to prevent a sudden change in temperature.

A strainer was used to seperate the water from the sediments and young tadpoles. The larger tadpoles will naturally swim away when being poured, but the pouring must still be done slowly.

The young tadpoles collected in the strainer were put directly into a bottle filled with rain water. The sudden change of water will make them stressed, but their survival is not the main priority.

Once there is less water in the container, it is easier to catch the more developed tadpoles with a spoon and transfer them to the cup of water that was just filtered.

The remaining water in the container was strained. Then, the cup of water containing the developed tadpoles was poured back into the original container. A small amount of rainwater was added as well.

After cleaning, there were still a lot of small sediments that made it through. I left the five biggest tadpoles in the container and the rest were transferred to the water bottle.

There are A LOT of the young tadpoles in the water bottle. I am not sure what I will do with them if they survive. At this stage, they cannot swim very well, so it is natural behaviour for them to float at the surface.

Besides the algae, tadpoles were also fed with spinach. Before feeding, the spinach was washed and boiled to soften it.