not had much frog spawn this year

gamston

hi folks, as title says frog spawn is down again this year, been going on for a few years now, used to have 40/50 frogs (mostly large ones) but over the last few years its gone down, think this year it was 20ish frogs and almost all were small frogs, had 4 clomps of spawn, 3 of them sunk in the pond, only 1 remained on the pond weed, 
land wise there has been no changes around here still the same as 30 years ago, so not sure if its the climate (rain/no rain, warmer winter etc)

Davesnave

Frogs have their own virus problems:

https://www.arc-trust.org/ranavirus

WeAreGhosts

I've had frogspawn that's sunk and gone mouldy this year, too, and some of the surviving spawn looks like it's not developing normally.

Grenage

We created a pond and added a small amount of spawn a couple of years ago; it takes a couple of years for frogs to be mature enough, but this year we've had about 6-10 clumps - all the tadpoles appear to have hatched.

silverwhistle

I was wondering when I might expect to see some frog spawn. I took on an overgrown allotment late last summer and amongst other things I put in a pond using a discarded liner. There's a bit of scrounged pond weed in there and now the weather is looking up hope to add some different varieties. There were a couple of frogs on the plot I saw as I tidied it up (some slow worms too) so is it best to let the frogs find their own way there?

I'm in southern Hampshire so with this lovely weather down here presume the frogs are getting a bit randy?

thriftwizard

silverwhistle, I'm in East Dorset so similar on the weather/temperature front, and our tadpoles have been hatching out for 3 weeks now; some are fairly big. Nowhere near as many as last year, I have to say, when the pond was fairly heaving with tadpoles; there were plenty of frogs & spawn this spring but a fair bit of the spawn just vanished somehow. Suspicion falls on the newts... 

gamston

not had a single tadpole so far, had 4 lumps of frog spawn all of them sunk to the floor of the middle level, normally I have 100's of tadpoles hatch out

WeAreGhosts

gamston said:

not had a single tadpole so far, had 4 lumps of frog spawn all of them sunk to the floor of the middle level, normally I have 100's of tadpoles hatch out

Me too. I've been investigating more today, and I do have some tadpoles, but a lot of the tadpoles are dead or have not formed properly and just look like little commas or dots.

gamston

got a string of toads spawn in the pond how they hatch out
also done a good deed found 2 lumps of hatching tadpoles in a muddy tractor tyre hole (that was almost dry) dug them out with a spade, cleaned them and got them in the pond