What do tadpoles eat?
When very little they eat the jelly around the egg; once this has gone they start on the algae on stones in the water, eventually, they become carnivores and eat the tadpoles which didn’t make it. I move the frog spawn out of my pond into a water feature with green-covered stones each Spring because the pond fish eat the frog eggs. As they mature, I add a tiny pinch of crumbled, flaked goldfish food every morning; you can watch them swim belly-up gulping down the tiny pieces of fish food. When they are bigger, I’ll move them back into the pond. Grown frogs enjoy fishermen’s maggots which you can buy at a fishing shop.
I’ve raised two tadpoles successfully into frogs before (they were wild ones, too!). After doing some research, I found that boiling some spinach for about ten minutes was all they needed. I’d make a big pot of the spoiled spinach, feed to the tadpoles, and then store in a baggie in the refrigerator. Each tadpole only needs about a pinch of the boiled spinach every day. I kept feeding the boiled spinach until they were on their own eating mealworms. Once they were out of the water (grew their legs and possibly still had their tail), I put the boiled spinach in a small dish, but also put meal worms in a separate dish. If the frogs weren’t interested in the meal worms yet, I’d use tweezers to pick up the meal worms and put it in front of the frogs nose. After a few seconds, the meal worm was gone in the frog’s mouth. Pretty simple. Tadpoles are a lot of fun to raise if you know how to care for them while they are transforming into frogs. I hope this helped.