I don’t like bugs. I live in fear of the giant crickets that live in the garage of my mom’s house that she has told me stories about. I’ve never seen them myself because I don’t go in the garage (there are bugs in there).
When my roommate, Emily, started her journey of adopting pet frogs from various reptile shows, she had only one — a salmon-colored Pacman frog named Gwen Stefroggy.
From what I gathered out of all the information she told me, Pacman frogs are called that because their mouth is the biggest part of their body, they can eat a lot, and she will get much bigger than the quarter-sized pink thing I was then looking at.
With Gwen, came a plastic cup of Dubia roaches — her food. Emily had placed the cup on my bed and smiled, “Wanna watch her eat?”
I watched her as she placed Gwen in a separate plastic cup lined with paper towels and took a pair of tweezers to fish out a roach. Carefully, she dropped it into the cup, and a few moments later, Gwen jerked her body to the side and crushed the roach in her mouth, holding it there.
Emily explains that she holds it on her tongue and uses it to slide the roach down her throat and swallow it whole.
I say, “I didn’t need to know that.”
Raising Gwen was not initially easy. After a few days of living with us, she stopped eating. No roach was appetizing enough, she refused every attempt. Over the next month, Emily watched Gwen get smaller and become almost translucent.
That is until she asked for advice at a pet store about what to do when your frog won’t eat, because apparently it is a common problem, and she was told to try mealworms.
Emily expressed that she always thought mealworms were bad for her because their shells were too hard to digest. Upon more research, she found that the same went for Dubia roaches.
“If she’s not eating anything, it’s better than nothing,” was what the woman at the pet store said. Emily bought the mealworms and Gwen started eating again.
Now, Gwen has erupted into the size of what I can only compare to an air pod case, and she still has years to grow. Having joined her in our frog family are Moto Moto, a Chubby Frog, and Fortnite, an Australian White’s Tree Frog.
Moto Moto is a ground-dwelling frog who only knows how to walk, dig and swim. They are called Chubby Frogs because they have chubby bodies with tiny faces.
Fortnite is a bright green when she is happy and turns soil brown when she is not, and in that way, we almost have a line of communication with her.
As you can probably tell, the naming process for the frogs has been a very fun process as well.
While I still dislike looking at the spindly bodies of the crickets we now feed them, the frogs have become like family to us. And after you get through the period of them barely eating, which each one of ours had, they are incredibly low maintenance.
Their enclosures are terrariums, which bring even more life to your space. The past few months of falling to sleep to the chirps of crickets is not so unbearable as I felt it would be before.