I have tadpoles by the thousand in my 7 acre pond. I know that bass will not eat them until they are frogs but want to know if they help or harm my goal of trophy bass. Last weekend I went out on the water at night and gigged several boone and crocket bullfrogs, tasted descent out of the deep fryer.

LMB and SMB will eat most all forms of frog tadpoles. Tadpoles are not their favorite food but when hungry bass will develop a taste for them. Some individual bass may like tadpoles compared to other more picky bass. Bull frog tadpoles will not survive well in weedfree ponds dominated by LMB. Survival of tadpoles improves when there is ample weedy cover.

SDB -- welcome to Pond Boss.

In my younger days, I caught a lot of bass with big tadpoles. I'd never heard that bass would not eat tadpoles.

Tadpoles and frogs should be very good for your bass. I've heard that bass will stay away from all frogs if they once try to eat a toad.

When you get a chance, go to our new member section and post a little bit about you and your pond.

Again, welcome.

Ken

I think the more of them you have the better. Good for the food chain. I've been told that having a lot of frogs is a sign of a good ecosystem. I have a ton of them too. Waiting some trophies myself.

I'm glad to hear this. I have culled my bass the past few years out of fear of being overstocked that they probably have plenty else to eat. I have 1 fish feeder which is dominated by my coppernose and tilapia so I should have favorable conditions for some trophies. I can literally see hundreds of tadpoles at a time when I spotlight and can catch them easily myself so I know that my bass should be able to as well.

Tadpoles can be a staple of LMB's diet. They are big, slow and super soft with no bones or spines. Especially big fat bullfrog polliwogs. Almost all of my customers ask for them. They can retail anywhere from .75 to $3 a pop. My latest pond I planted at least 1500. I use polliwog colored lures with great success in my lmb polliwog ponds. If the polliwogs do not have cover your population will eventually die off from no recruitment. And I would never eat bullfrogs from my own ponds as they provide so much forage with almost zero negative impact to the fish. Not much eats full grown bullfrogs. I also feed my bullfrog polliwogs pellets to pump them up. I remove and relocate garter snakes to protect my frogs. I provide as much marginals and shoreline cover as I can. In my opinion they are one of the under used forage items in the pond business.

Once again floating islands prove their value, my islands are loaded with bullfrogs, and the pond is full of tadpoles.

I've found that bass will not eat anything unless it fits in their mouth....

PF, with a name the pond frog I would not expect any different. I agree cover is key for frogs and snakes. The bad thing is many of my clients hate snakes more than they like frogs.

I had a complete die off of tadpoles in my biggest pond this year. Whatever it was it had no effect on the fish. Hundreds of dead tadpoles everywhere. No chemicals were applied or anything different this year except one of the biggest populations of tadpoles prior to the die off that I've ever seen.

The adult bullfrogs seem O.K. although they are nowhere as numerous as they once were. I saw a few dead ones but not too many.

I try to give the fish sustained forage I really do not have to manage or replant. There is where frogs are perfect. Those big ol frogs make thousands of polliwogs. And those polliwogs eat algae, and bad plant matter and in turn are forage for my fat LMB. Or something else in the food chain. Plus, I can stck my LMB all that higher with a dense frog population. Give them soem shore cover, and get rid of garter snakes and you can tolerate the birds. They don't mess with the adults either. You will get recruitment.

A lot of my customers say the same thing, I remember when I was a kid we went out catching frogs and polliwogs. I have super rich customers, and they actually ask for frogs. I have planted at least 2,000 polliwogs so far this season, and I cannot meet demand for adults. I have a new moon coming up next week, I'll run a long night that night gathering adults, especially females.

If you have shoreline plants, LMB will just sit on the edges, waiting for them to swim out. Not only does it give the fish super easy forage, it presents great fishing opportunities. My ponds with no frogs, the lmb are the skinniest. Of course I have gambusia, bg, gsf, res and crawdads also. But I try to give the LMB huge amounts of natural forage, and make that a self sustaining population. A frog in a pond just keeps on cranking out more forage then any other critter, year after year. The more the merrier. Recruited or future classes of lmb inhale them. They are trained on the little ones. And you know how much it costs to feed frogs? Nothing.

I have hundreds of 1/2" long toads in the grass surrounding the pond, only 2 or 3 bullfrogs that I've seen/heard. The LMB won't eat the small toads, but the BG will if they're tossed in the water.

Other than frogs I have purposely tossed into the water, I have never seen a bass eat a frog. I am not saying they don't, but with the hundreds of hours I have spent on the water I figured I'd have seen that by now. I did have a smallie cough up a leopard frog once when I got it in the boat. I don't think having frogs around your pond is a bad thing, but in the end I doubt they add much than 1% or less of the forage percentage of bass in a pond even in ponds chock full of frog habitat and frogs.

CJ:

I'm like you in never seeing a frog get eaten, but after seeing the life cycle of this pond for a few years I can't believe the number of tadpoles that get eaten. In the spring I have 10's of thousands of toad tadpoles around the edge of the pond, then I only see probably a couple hundred baby toads, then less than 50 adults.

I did fish a small 18 acre natural pond as a kid that had tons of frogs. I do know the bass loved nailing the frogs as on occasion the lily pads would explode and the frog would come up missing. The pond had stunted overpopulated bluegills but that didn't stop the bass from going after the frogs.

The frogs were dynamite as bait as well on the 18 acre pond, and the adjacent lake that was 35 acres.

I used to use baby bullfrogs for bait for leery lmb. They just could not resist them. And nothing better than a surface explosion of a big lmb going for a frog. But it's the polliwogs they eat all day long. Nothing fatter and slower in the pond. But they make terrible bait, too fragile to cast. Many of my lures are polliwog color patterns and size. They outfish everything else in my tackle box.

I have my LMBs trained to eat BG that I throw in at one spot in my pond. Recently I came across a spot that was just crawling with tadpoles. So I netted several of them and went to my hand feeding spot. When I threw the first one in it was taken with an explosion immediately. The next few were taken but I would sometimes see the tadpole slowly swimming away and another LMB would come and take it. I saw a couple of times where a bass would come up and take the tadpole in its mouth and then spit it out again. By the end they weren't even going for them. Maybe I spoiled them with the BG. But why would they not want something about the same size WITHOUT the spiny fins.

They may have a bitter taste or something similar as a protective adaptation. It could be the bass have to be quite hungry to take them on a regular basis.

Toads as we all know are mildly poisonous to anything that puts them in their mouth so...

How can you tell a bullfrog tadpole from a big toad tadpole or any other big frog tadpoles