Miller, S. 2013. Environmental enrichment for Xenopus Laevis. Enrichment Record 14, 12-13.

Environmental enrichment has become an important aspect of animal care in research facilities over the years. It is easy to come up with enrichment for mice, rats, and other mammals; however, what do you get for enrichment for aquatics such as Xenopus? This is the question we were trying to answer at our Vivarium. We tried to think of things a Xenopus would have in their natural environment, but would also be practical in a controlled lab setting. First we started with rocks. We found that the frogs liked to hide in the rocks, but when they would kick up food along the bottom they would get the rocks in their mouth Environmental Enrichment for Xenopus Iaevis and spit them back out. We then tried bigger colored rocks which they liked to play with, but eventually ignored. Looking for better ideas, we came across floating plastic plants and squares of plastic plants that sat on the bottom of the cage. We checked carefully to make sure there were no sharp edges the frogs could cut themselves on, and nothing about the plastic that could harm our frogs in any way. We noted obvious changes in the behavior of the frogs after adding the plants to the tanks. The frogs changed from always hanging out in the back of their cage to coming up to the front wanting food from the technicians as they entered the room. A couple of the frogs have even started to eat kibbles out of the tech?s fingers when being fed which they would never do before the plant enrichment. We interpreted this to mean the frogs felt safer and were willing to interact more with animal care staff. Our next step was to find a food enrichment of some kind we could feed once a week to enhance their natural hunting skills. We tried 2 different types of food enrichment, frozen blood worms and live crickets.