03-13-2012, 02:03 AM
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Join Date: Jun 2004
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Re: Can frogs eat too much?
I don't have a quick and easy answer, and I don't have any good pics to really show it... it's something I've been thinking about for a while and really need to get out and illustrate. It's based of the idea of scoring body condition based on physiology, how the animal carries fat, and how their natural life cycle in the wild may play a part. I had an idea about this before learning that this was an actual technique used in the animal nutrition field.
PDFs, like most frogs, have fat distributed not like a coating just inside the skin (which you see more often with people), but more as fatty pads distributed in and around organs. This is one of the reasons people have a hard time judging obesity in frogs because they think it will look like a fat person but they don't. Their legs are the last part to get fatty it seems, and they are more likely to develop obvious fat pads on their belly (frog boobs) and jowls just above the shoulder (this can make their eardrum more obvious). If viewed from above the frog isn't generally the same width around the shoulders down to the hip area, but instead is distended like a balloon there are a few options - very fat frog, a major infect causing bloat (you'd notice it behaving differently, this is uncommon), or a female full of eggs. Overwieght frogs can be hard to sex because it hides a lot of the diagnostic shape of a mature animal (both bloated like a girl). Sometimes it's even hard to tell when a girl has even laid.
Legs are what I primarily look for in long term condition... an underweight frog recently fed will have a big belly, but thinner, stick like legs if it's been starved. Unless severly obese, a healthy frog and a fat frog have similar sized, muscular legs. In severly obese you'll see fat along the thighs - that's REALLY bad. There are a couple of other physiological areas to look, but they can vary by species, population, and sex so I try not to bring that up too early in learning about it. People bring up bony backs a lot, but in the larger tinc morphs (females of the giant morphs and especially citronellas for some reason) this can actually be normal in a completely healthy animal.
Many PDFs are seasonal so gaining and losing some weight during the year isn't a bad thing, and a swing back and forth between the thin side of healthy to the thick side of healthy is good - just a little fat around the middle often burned off with intense breeding and/or to get them through a dry season. It's just the line of what is healthy is either not well known, or very blurred in this hobby.
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