There is an article about an unusual frog meal-victim in one of the dedicated 'Birding' type magazines several years ago ... A woman had watched a favoured large frog in her garden pond catch & devour a nearby hovering hummingbird. To confirm what she believed she had seen, she investigated at a later point and wrote that she did find some of the hummer's bones plus some feathers by her pond - mixed in throughout the droppings of that frog.
Back in the 1950's, as a youngster, we would catch large bullfrogs (Now quite rare) in the marshes & lakeside edges by using fishing lures dangled in front of the frog to entice them to 'hit' them. Sometimes those bass lures would be quite large (Today I would consider such behaviour to be cruel and unwarranted, even when & where a season exists for the harvest of frogs legs as a meal) (Which is what we were doing way back then) ... A frog will attempt to catch & to swallow anything alive & moving (Or appearing to be so) that it thinks it will be able to swallow whole.
Although I have heard of pond frogs catching goldfish that surfaced in their pond, I have never experienced or actually seen such an incident.
We have maintained a haphazard collection of a few small bog type water gardens in a collection of various containers (Approx. 10-25 gallon sizes) None were deeper than about 10 inches - some as shallow as 5-6 inches. We set these on top of our septic tank cover, immediately adjacent to a large rock garden that has many closely planted sedums, primula, iris, euphorbia, etc. Within the 'ponds' themselves we've enjoyed collecting small bog & water plants including a few elephant ears plus duckweed etc. ... And unexpectedly, frogs showed up every season. Every season, despite the fact that we are at least a mile or so from any natural water source.
This year, so far we have only one green frog in residence. Last season we counted as many as 11 at one point. Our highest count was 17 individual frogs of various sizes. Whenever it rained the population would drop back as the frogs would return to the gardens & nearby fields to forage we believe. When the weather again became drier, the frog count would increase again.
Our only negative about creating an environment for both the bog plants & the frogs is that raccoons find both attractive for their food searches . In one night we went from a pleasing natural looking collection of bog gardens with about 15-17 resident frogs, to a mess of scattered plants, overturned tubs and several body parts of partially eaten frogs. Reality. Life in the country. We simply cleaned up and restarted the collection.
