Creating a Vivarium for Frogs or Toads
With their help, we created this small twenty gallon vivarium for frogs or toads. A vivarium is kind of like an aquarium. It has an area that is for water and an area that is out of the water. What we made with ours is the whole bottom is underwater and several areas with rocks for the frogs to play on.
We have fire bellied toads and they love the water. If you are going to build a tank like ours you need to make sure that the animal you put in it likes to be in water. This is the same for any animal you want to keep as a pet, you must know something about the pet before you get it.
Fire bellied toads, green tree frogs and whites tree frogs all like this kind of set up. They enjoy the wetter environment and do well in it. For the two frogs you do not need to have as much water as the toads though. The toads love to swim, the two frogs are more apt to stay on the rocks, sides of the tank or on plastic limbs.
First, before you go out and buy a frog or toad you should set the tank up and have it going strong before you introduce a new pet. You should leave the tank for a week before trying out an amphibian to make sure it has gotten all the chlorine evaporated out of the water and maybe even longer for the plants to start to thrive.
With all three amphibians you need some things to be sure they stay put in the tank instead of hopping around your house. The lid needs to be secure with no holes for them to get out. It needs to stay on the tank with some kind of latch to make sure they can’t work their way out by pushing up on it.
This sounds funny but over the years I have found more than my fair share of pets running around loose or in the case of one, dried and shriveled up. It’s not fun to wonder all day where you will the find little thing.
So, we’ll start with the things you’ll need for this project and what you can do without. The first of course is an aquarium with a good fitting lid. Ours is a twenty gallon with a lid made for it. The lid has a light that sits on a pane of glass and the door is another pane of glass with a handle.
The aquarium is your regular aquarium and can be purchased at Walmart or wherever. If you plan to get an aquarium as a package deal get one with the bottom filter.
The filter is the one thing that needs to be the cheaper bottom kind. It has a large plastic bottom that has a tube in the one corner. The pump sits outside the tank and a small hose runs from the pump into a small tube that goes into the tube in the corner.
There is a top to the tube and a small air diffuser at the end of the hose. The top is a right angle thing that points the water toward the side as the pump bubbles air through the hose. The action of the bubbles going up the tube through the diffuser creates a pumping action up the tube with the air bubbles and out the right angle of the top.
The water moves up with the air bubbles from the bottom of the tank under the plastic part of the filter. This creates a circulating effect in the whole tank that traps the gunk and other things under the filter and keeps the water clean. Every so often you need to change out some of the water to keep it clean.
You only need one filter for the tank. You will be using one of the tubes on one side of the tank, not both of the tubes that may have come with the kit. I used both bottom pieces with a plug in the hole for the tube on one side and the regular set up with the tube, small tube, diffuser and top.
To set up the filter you can follow the directions that come with the filter, using just one filter tube setup on one side. You have to decide which side to put the tube on at this point.
Your decision will be based partly on where you put the tank. I have it on one side due to that being the side my sons bunk bed is on. You can have it on either side or in the front or back. However you want to place the filter tube is up to you.
Have the air hose run up the corner and out the little hole provided in the cover. You will also use another hole in the cover if you use a small pump inside the tank but I’ll get to that in a bit.
So I mentioned a few things rather quickly in the past paragraphs and I’ll go over them in a list. These are the things you’ll need so far:
Tank with Cover
Bottom Filter
Tube for bottom filter
Top for tube
Smaller tube that goes into bottom filter tube
Diffuser
Air Pump with air hose
You can get all these in a kit or you can purchase them separately. I have over the years acquired many parts of fish tanks and have found quite a number of parts at garage sales and thrift stores.
Now we need a couple of other things. I have a pond pump in my tank that not only filters water some but keeps the water circulating and keeps the toads amused. You do not need one of these but if you do there are some things you need to know.
I bought mine at a home improvement store; yes, you guessed it, on sale. It is the small kind that sits in the water and has a hose that attaches to the pump. You put the pump in the water and the hose goes wherever you want the water to go to. I piled some rocks and made a small right angle spout out of a fitting I got at the time I got the pump.
You can set up something like this or use your imagination to do something different. Or you can just have the small piece of hose go up and the water splash down on some rocks like it came out of the package. My pump came with a small piece of tube but I bought some more.
You need to be sure of one thing before you plug the pump in. It has to be under water before you run the pump. It has to have water in it all the time to run. You have to make sure you keep the water above the pump. Otherwise these pumps run and do not need much else.
Place the pump on the bottom of the tank and put a rock on it to keep it down. If it has suction cups use them to stick it on the glass but keep it at the bottom. Run the cord up the other corner from the air hose and out to an outlet but don’t plug it in yet. We don’t have water in it and we need that.
There is a small foam sleeve you can get for some to help filter the water out and you need to take this off on occasion and wash it out.
So we now have an added thing with the pump and of course the rocks that we have as our water fall. Don’t be worried if you don’t have a water fall, you’ll do fine with just some rocks for the frogs or toads to run or hop around on.
The rocks can be just about any kind that you find or ones you buy. I have found most of the ones from another project of my kids, geology or rock collecting. We have quite an assortment of rocks in our house and basement and can use a bunch of them in plants and aquariums.
You should wash off everything, especially rocks you’ve collected. Make sure there is no dirt or whatever stuck in the cracks or crevices of the rock and wash them off thoroughly with water. You should not use porous rocks like lava rocks either, they will not sit in place in water for long until the water soaks into them.
I used a collection of granite and quartz rocks from all over. Plus an odd piece here and there. In the bottom we will need some gravel to cover the filter. This can be any color you want but I went with a regular river rock color.
My tank is natural and I wanted all the colors to be about the same, like in the wild. I put the gravel in the bottom and around the small pump and then placed rocks to stack up in the corner. I have the rocks kind of hiding the hose for the pump.
As you can see by the photo I have placed several rocks around the tank for the toads to swim up to and sit on. This will especially be important for feeding. You need to have one rock at least that is for feeding of things like meal worms. If you feed crickets they will swim around until eaten.
This rock should be pretty flat on the top and be out of the water at all times. You can place this one anywhere but it should be were you always feed your amphibians. You can just drop the worms or crickets here and the frogs or toads will do the rest.
If you have one of the frogs, whites or green tree you should give the frogs some more areas for them to get out of the water. They like the trees and glass to climb on and a plastic limb or something else for them to climb on that will take to being soaked and not rot will work.
You can find all kinds of things at a pet store made from plastic that will work, limbs, fake rocks and funny shapes like signs will be available. Use what you want but keep it simple and you will have a nice looking scene in your tank.
Now that we have everything in place we can fill the tank. You need to have the water a couple of inches deep for the filter and pump to work, but that’s about it. The water has to stay above the pump at all times if you used one. You should have a few rocks for the animals to sit on and get warm under a light.
Yep, you’ll need a light for your tank, too. The kind that sits on the glass cover is fine but you should have something for them to sun themselves with. A bulb for reptiles and amphibians should be used, but if you can’t get one, some sun light will work if they get it from a window.
They should not be kept in an unlighted area like a basement with no windows, the plants won’t like this. Oh, we need some plants, too. Okay, the plant in mine is a common houseplant that you might have. It is not a hard to find aquatic plant that is picky and hard to take care of.
I have tried to kill it off but short of not giving it water for months or putting it in a closet I have failed. The plant is the Heart Leafed Philodendron. It can take going from dirt, having its roots washed out of any and all dirt and stuck into water with no problem. Just wash it off good and place it into the water that has been sitting for a couple of days and it should take off.
I have a glass container sitting on my buffet with a couple of vines of philodendron and some gravel on the bottom as a house plant. I clipped it from the ones in my sons toad tank because I have to keep cutting them back because they grow so well. They use the frogs droppings as food and thrive.
This is one reason that you will find you need to wash out the tank much less than if you didn’t put anything in it. The frogs or toads and even any dead crickets or worms will act as fertilizer for the plant.
You can also find some other plants that thrive well in an aquatic setting. They have some that are completely underwater at pet stores and you can visit your local florist for some hints and tips. You can even search the internet but it would just be easier to go to a florist and ask them.
I found it a little daunting to start getting all kinds of names of plants to use as aquatics and not have a clue as to where to get them. A florist will be able to tell you if they have anything that will work and of course your local pet store might have some.
Now we have all the things in the tank for a healthy, thriving vivarium. A filter system, rocks and gravel, plants and of course water. Add the fire bellied toad, green tree frog or whites tree frog and have fun.
Some house keeping tips are things that you will have to do no matter what type of tank you keep your frogs or toads in, just a little different. You need to clean the tank but more like washing the windows. I have found that I need to use one of those glass cleaners with a magnet to scrub the algae from the glass needs to be done every few weeks.
You need to check the water and swish it around to see how much junk is at the bottom of the tank. When you get a cloud of stuff coming up in the water and clouding it up it’s time for some water change. You can scoop water out with a cup to get out the stuff near the bottom.
I have found though that it’s easiest to just leave it. If the plants are healthy they should take care of most of the stuff in the bottom for you. Once in a while you might have to fully take the tank apart and move things around to clean it out. You can do this without much fuss. Just save some of the water and use it to start over.
I have found that this setup works quite well with our fire bellied toads, they are happy and have lived quite a long time for toads. The plant is thriving and growing like crazy, once a month I have to cut it back to keep it from taking over the tank. The toads like to jump around on the leaves and the crickets we occasionally feed them can hide out for some time on the leaves till lunch time.
