Wild Creatures being Treated as Pets

It's about time for another pet update around here.  We still have two frogs.  My favorite - Tad - hopped out of the aquarium one night when I was feeding them.  He (or she) made two enormous hops into the darkness and that was that.

Toad (on the rock) and Rog (in the rock).  Also a little plant that is growing in the coral rock.

Toad is voracious and eats almost all the bugs before Rog gets a chance.  Especially when we feed them crickets because they are sitting ducks and Toad jumps in the box and gobbles them up.  Toad is 3x bigger than Rog and there is a real chance he will eat Rog.  He certainly is almost big enough to do it.  It is fun to watch them eat when we feed them flying insects, not so much when we feed them crickets.  They will eat just about anything - beetles, flies, mosquitoes.

Also we have noticed that the frogs change color from speckled (like in the above picture) to a pale green.

In the bottom of the aquarium there are about 3 inches of water.  Rob and Caleb caught a fish and 2 water snails and they live there too. 

Snail - the smaller one.  We didn't name them.

The fish had babies and so now we have about 30 baby fish too.

Aw, so cute!

The fish and the snails in the aquarium are no maintenance pets.  They eat the gunk growing in the bottom and keep it pretty clean, even without a filter.

And when we buy crickets, we buy about 50.  I had trouble with them dying so the guy at the reptile shop gave me some cricket keeping tips.  It worked, but I am starting to feel like we are running a zoo!

The kids would really like to catch a lizard and add that to the mix somehow, but I am at capacity when it comes to special needs pets that don't earn their keep - at least Mako guards the house and provides entertainment.  I think the aquarium/terrarium contributes to our schoolwork.  Caleb really enjoys observing the fish and the frogs.  It's a temporary zoo anyway.