THERE'S A BIG MONEY IN THE SECRET ART OF FROG FARMING!

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As a final self-cleansing touch, Slabaugh leaves a trickle of water flowing through his ponds at all times. Wirescreen filters at each end of the chain of pools keeps out foreign matter and frogeating snakes.

FEEDING TIME

The natural diet of adult bullfrogs consists mainly of live flying insects, but Leonard has a "secret" food supplement which-he swears-dramatically increases his livestock's rate of growth.

He wouldn't tell me what this supplement is . . . but I did notice thousands of tiny crawfish flipping around in Slabaugh's ponds with both his tadpoles and mature stock. Leonard didn't want to talk much about the crawfish, however, so we dropped the subject.

(In Arkansas, Vol Brashears says his frogs love crawfish and eat them almost exclusively. Vol adds a few flying insects to the amphibians' diet by hanging a series of light bulbs around the frogs' watery homes. The lights-which are left on a couple of hours each night-attract thousands of flying snacks for his ever-hungry but fat bullfrogs.)

Since tadpoles are largely vegetarian - except for all-too-frequent nibbles at their brothers and sisters-they need a lot of natural pond greenery to eat while they're growing. A healthy algae bloom can provide both phytoplankton and zooplankton for the baby amphibians . . . which also relish common "pond moss" or Spirogyra. These natural foods, obviously, should be encouraged.

Bear in mind, though, that you can get too much of a good thing . . . in this case, weed and algae growth. That is: While it's true that mature frogs breathe air, tadpoles must get their oxygen from the water in which they swim . . . and weeds and algae sometimes can draw so much oxygen from a pool of water that there's nothing left for anything else. If you ever see your tads coming up to the surface and trying to breathe (just the way fish occasionally do in a stagnant lake), skim off or otherwise cut back the plant growth in that pond . . . immediately.

DISEASES

Although bullfrogs seem to be fairly disease-resistant—Slabaugh has never had an epidemic in his stock—two illnesses can strike your aquatic crop if you allow your ponds to become overcrowded or dirty.

Saprolegnia is an ugly fungus that sometimes grows on a bullfrog's skin and the disease is very contagious. No cure is known and infected amphibians should be separated from their healthy brothers and sisters and destroyed as soon as possible.

Another—equally ugly—disorder is caused by bacillus hydrophillus fascus and is commonly known as "red leg". The slang name comes from the fact that the bacteria cause the blood vessels in a frog's legs to congest, swell, and turn red. This condition can be fatal . . . but it is often cured merely by keeping the infected amphibians out of water and in a cool place for several days.

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