Managing Mosquito Larvae

There is nothing quite like spending time by the pond watching little beings such as frogs, dragon flies, hover flies, and birds live their busy lives.

However this experience was made far less pleasant when certain little beings busy lives include sucking blood out of you and possibly giving you diseases (around here Ross River Virus is spread by mosquitoes) and if you are like me mosquito bites cause itchy welts. In the end I was busy cutting their lives short to extend my own!

Much to my horror my pond was a first rate breeding ground for these creatures. I was torn. There is no such thing as a totally tadpole friendly fish. However some are kinder than others, so after researching I bought four local West Australian pygmy perch. They only grow about 6 cm long and because of their dull colouring I rarely got a glimpse of them. However they did do an excellent job of eating mosquitoe larvae.


I don't have a pump and had to keep the pond topped up to keep oxygen levels high as well as regularly removing algal growth by hand. The fish bred to quite large numbers. I estimate between 50 - 60 of these fish were in the ponder in under a year.


Unfortunately my father suddenly grew ill and I spent time away from home to be with him. Sadly he passed and after returning home all the fish were floating on top of the pond, dead. I assume that not topping up the pond and allowing the algae to grow unchecked for a fortnight caused a lack of oxygen which killed them all.

Other surprises from Frog friendly gardens.

I suspect it took a wee bit of will power for my husband not to scream when he was about to put his foot down on this lovely visitor.

These heat loving lizards can look quite scary as they hiss and open their mouth up wide and poke out their blue tongues when they feel threatened.

Covering their heads gently and picking them up behind their necks while supporting their bodies with your other hand makes it easy to move them somewhere a little more natural for them. I wonder if they eat frogs?

The bridge.

The bridge offers shade for our pond as well as giving a great viewing platform. The shade is important to prevent too much algal growth and ensures the pond won't get too hot. The frogs when startled are quite happy to dive under it for cover as well as finding it a place to hang out.

My husband and I designed and made the bridge - it was a very simple design.
Two long treated pine sleepers that we sawed the ends off (we borrowed a chain saw to do this) to form an angle that were set atop 4" by 2" f10 hardwood. It was slightly wider than the sleepers to form a lip that the frogs like to sit on. Then we nailed decking on. It took us only a couple of hours to build the whole bridge once we started. Then we just had to sit it over our pond. Wallah!

Building a frog pond from scratch.

Some research into frogs in our state indicated that it is against the law to keep frogs in captivity without a license. It also turned out that releasing frogs into other local habitats was not a good idea either as it may introduce diseases and unbalances the DNA pool by releasing frogs that have reached adulthood with great assistance rather than having the fittest survive through natural means.
With help from my wonderful spouse we followed the advice from this pamphlet found at http://www.wrc.wa.gov.au/swanavon/pdf/pub_frogs.pdf and also advice from frogs.org.au/frogwatch/bitg.html
The advice is local so I would recommend you see if you can find local advice.
We let the water settle for three days before releasing the frogs and changelings into the pond.
They must have liked it because we saw them hanging around the pond on warm days from then on.

Tadpoles are easy - young frogs on the other hand...

I fed the tadpoles on boiled lettuce leaves and they sucked the flesh off it. They were also fed fish food that they just couldn't seem to get enough of. That bucket load of tadpoles soon started growing legs and arms. The changlings were moved into a an aquarium where they had easy access to land.

I had read that they needed 10% of there body weight in live food. I spent such a ridiculous amount of time stalking and catching flies and other insects to feed the young frogs, I felt like I had become half frog myself!

I loved watching the froglets stalking the crawling insects, before leaping with open mouths and a stubby tongue to gobble their prey. But much to my frustration they simply didn't show any interest in the easy to catch slugs and snails on offer and ignored the mosquitoes which seemed to instinctively know just to keep still.

Welcome to my Frog Pond page.

Welcome to the frog pond network.

It all began when a fellow teacher asked me on the last day of school if I wanted some tadpoles that she was going to place into her Koi pond. I couldn't bare to think of those poor tadpoles destroyed by Koi (a foreign fish here in Australia), so took them home. All to our dry barren coastal garden!!

This blog is a story in progress about my novice experience as a frog lover.