Can Fire-Bellied Toads Eat Springtails?

Can a Fire-Bellied Toad Eat Springtails?

For adults they are too small to be a meal, but they are genuinely useful for froglets and very small juveniles.

Springtails are tiny soil arthropods, named for the furcula — a forked appendage folded under the abdomen that snaps down to fling the animal away from danger. That is the spring, and it is why a disturbed culture looks like it is popping.

What Springtails Actually Do

Springtails eat decomposing organic matter, mould and fungus. In a bioactive enclosure — one with live plants and a living substrate rather than paper towel — that makes them the maintenance crew.

• They eat mould before it establishes, which is the single most common problem in a humid enclosure
• They break down waste and shed skin in the substrate
• They keep the soil alive, which is what makes a bioactive setup work at all
• They are harmless — they do not bite, do not damage plants, and do not bother the animal

They are usually run alongside isopods, which handle the coarser material springtails cannot. The pair is the standard bioactive cleanup crew.

Getting a Culture Going

Seed the substrate and leave them alone. They need moisture — a substrate that dries out completely will lose the colony — and they feed on what the enclosure produces. A population takes a few weeks to build to the point where you notice it doing anything.

More in the springtail collection.