AphidsDendroworld: FAQ:
Food
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Algae is a natural and nutritious food for dartfrog tadpoles. The simplest way to provide algae is to keep tadpole containers brightly illuminated (but not in full sunlight so they overheat). You are not likely to provide enough algae for a complete diet but any is a valuable supplement. Powdered, dried algae can be bought in Health Food shops and is a good food for tadpoles. Ask for Spirulina or Chlorella. Used very sparingly or it fouls the water - tadpole water should not smell!
In the wild, ants and termites form a major part of the diet of dendrobatids. Unfortunately, dendrobatids will not eat any British species of ant (yes, we've tried it).
AphidsAphids are seasonally available and a very good food for frogs, which really
seem to like them. Black aphids are not as attractive as attractive to frogs
as green aphids because they don't move as much and some may be distasteful,
but frogs will still eat them. Stinging nettles, sycamore and water lilies are
good for collecting aphids at different times of the summer. If you collect
from "the wild" be careful of pesticide contamination. The safest way is to
allow a clump of stinging nettles to grow in a corner of the garden just for
this annual aphid feast! They're pretty easy to grow, so if you don't have your
own nettle patch, just pull up a bit of root from somewhere and plant it! Bonus:
You can also cut the nettles, dry them in a very low oven and grind up the powder
for excellent free tadpole food! And if you get really hungry, you can eat the
nettles yourself - mmm, nutritious!
Aphids can be cultured year round if you
maintain a constant supply of the food plants the aphids need and exclude predators,
but this is hard work and most people give up in quite a short time.
Bloodworms (aquatic midge larvae), live or frozen, are relished by dartfrog tadpoles and are a good way of supplementing the diet and replicating the natural diet tadpoles eat in the wild, where lots of insect larvae are consumed.
Most cockroaches are too big for dartfrogs, but green banana cockroaches (Panchlora nivea) are accepted by some frogs. These are relatively easy but slow to culture. The life cycle is quite long from neonate to adult roach (around 6 months @ 75°F). Keep them on a damp but not sodden soil substrate with length of moistened cardboard egg crate on the surface. Once a week add pieces of carrot peelings and potato skin as food. Give the container good ventilation otherwise they are prone to mites because of the high humidity! These cockroaches fly (!) but will not infest your house.
Hatchling brown (Acheta domesticus) or black (Gryllus bimaculatus) crickets can be fed to dartfrogs. Like most insects, crickets contain a reversed calcium:phosphorus (Ca:P) ratio, i.e. because they have no bones, they contain more P than Ca. Frogs have bones and need more Ca then P or they will develop bone disease and deformities. This problem can be fixed by "gut-loading" (feeding) the crickets with a Ca-rich food, or dusting with Calcium-vitamin powder before feeding. Adult crickets are too big for dartfrogs to eat. If any survive to adulthood in the vivarium, they may chew on your frogs and will eat your plants. Did we also mention that crickets stink and when (not if) they escape, they will keep you awake all night?
Daphnia (water "fleas") are relished by dendrobatid tadpoles and are a good way of supplementing the diet and replicating the natural diet tadpoles eat in the wild. Easy to grow in a tub of water in a sunny spot in your garden.
Video by Alan Cann on culturing Drosophila:
Fruit flies (Drosophila) are the staple diet for most dartfrogs. Several
species of Drosophila are commonly cultured, D. hydei (larger flies which are
naturally flightless) and D. melanogaster (smaller flies, usually flightless
or wingless mutant strains). Mutant strains may revert to wild type flying
flies, although different mutants revert at different frequencies. If your flies
revert,
the easiest solution is to discard them and start again with a fresh culture.
Like other insects, Drosophila need to be dusted with calcium-vitamin powder
before feeding to correct the Ca:P ratio and prevent bone disease in your frogs.
While it is possible to buy Drosophila cultures, growing your own is
a cheaper and more reliable way of providing a constant food source for frogs.
It is
possible to buy dried Drosophila medium online or make your own medium:
Recipe
1: Mashed banana, ReadyBreak or rolled oats, dried or bakers yeast. Add a generous
amount of flies to start the culture and a folded paper towel or other perch
for adult flies to rest on.
Recipe 2:
1 cup ReadyBrek, 1/3 cup dried potato flakes (not powder or granules), 1/2 tsp
sugar, 1/2 tsp dried yeast. Add enough orange juice to make the medium moist
but not sopping wet (a little dry medium at the bottom is good as the medium
becomes more liquid with time).
Incubate 8-24 hours to allow the yeast to start going, then add a folded paper
towel for the flies to climb on and AT LEAST 50-100 flies in order to keep
the medium churned and prevent excessive bacterial colonization.
Drosophila cultures smell. The solution is to add a little honey to the culture which reduces the smell but may also reduce fly production. Alternatively, keep your fly cultures in a closed cabinet containing an aquarium airpump vented to the outside. There are hundreds if not thousands of species of mite which can infest Drosophila cultures. Some just compete with the flies for food, others are directly harmful to the flies. Either way, they reduce fly production and you don't want them! So: Always dust files and sift in a sieve to knock off mites before starting new cultures. Don't keep any culture longer than 4 weeks (5 weeks for D.hydei). Inspect cultures for mites regularly and trash any infested cultures - zero tolerance for mites!
In summers, you can find lots of earwigs in unsprayed flowers such as dahlias and chrysanthemums. Some frogs, notably Phyllobates bicolor and P. terribilis will eat earwigs. The downside is that any which survive in the vivarium may damage plants, so feed heavily dusted in a deep, steep-sided dish.
Close relatives of silverfish but requiring higher temperatures for breeding. Opinions differ as to how high a temperature is required and how likely they are to escape and damage your house. One culture method is to grow them in open top glass tanks. A substrate of newspaper is used and pieces of egg carton/cardboard provided for shelter. Some cotton wool is placed in for egg laying which is regularly removed to a rearing tank and replaced with fresh. Cultures are feed on dry dog biscuit & bran. Culture tanks are placed in large trays to form a moat of water to stop any escapees from eating the shed, this water is heated to slightly above 30°C which keeps the firebrats at the correct temperature for breeding and maintains humidity at about 50-60%.
Fish food (flakes or tablets) are a staple food for dartfrog tadpoles. Although some people feed only one type of food, it's probably a good idea to diversify the tadpoles diet with other foods.
Flour beetles (Tribolium)
Flour beetle larvae are a very useful backup for when your fly cultures fail,
and also a good way of diversifying the frog's diet. The standard growth medium
consists of sifted flour plus dried yeast. However, dried yeast granules do
not pass though a fine sieve, so powdered baby milk (packed with nutrition)
in a ratio of about 5:1 flour:milk, is a good substitute.
The cultures need
to be kept dry or you will have problems with mites and mold. Open plastic boxes
are often used for flour beetle cultures, but the beetles can sometimes climb
out, so cover cultures with lids containing a large, fine-mesh ventilation panel,
which also keeps intruders out. Place a few pieces of screwed up kitchen paper
towel on top of the culture which the beetles like to climb on. This makes it
easy to harvest the adults when you need to start a new culture. The adult beetles
have glands on the abdomen and thorax which release a pungent gas containing
bitter-tasting quinones when the insects are agitated. This is one reason (in
addition to preventing mold and mites) why cultures need good ventilation. It
also means that most frogs find the adult beetles distasteful, although some
frogkeepers use do use the pale-coloured newly emerged beetles. Frogs that have
been exposed to the nasty-tasting adult beetles will often refuse to take them
again, and may also refuse the larvae, presumably on the basis of smell. For
this reason, it is necessary to separate the larvae from the beetles.
When you have a flourishing "mother" culture, use a fine-mesh sieve to sift out a portion of the medium, removing all the beetles and larvae. Replace the medium you have taken from the mother culture with fresh medium. Incubate the sifted medium in a warmish place and in a week you can sift this again and obtain only larvae with no beetles present. You can then continue to harvest these subcultures once or twice a week for a month or more, until either the supply of larvae diminishes or adult beetles appear. For a continuous supply, start as many new sifted subcultures as you need each week.
Tribolium beetles are allergenic, i.e. cause allergies, and mites contaminating the culture may also be highly allergenic. Sifting cultures or any other procedure which produces dust is the main problem. A few simple precautions can help. Work in a well ventilated area, try to minimize the production of dust, consider wearing a dust mask and possibly goggles (available from D.I.Y. stores) to reduce exposure, and be very careful if you suffer from allergies or asthma.
In mammals, folic acid is known to reduce neural tube defects in developing embryos. For this reason, it has been suggested (but not proved) that it may help in preventing or reducing spindly leg syndrome (SLS - see Disease).
Adult frogs will easily survive for a week if well fed before you leave (but don't add so much food that it is constantly crawling over the frogs). Froglets may need feeding more frequently, although again, adding springtails before you leave is a good idea.
Too big for dart frogs unfortunately, forget them!
Hatchling mantids may be a suitable food source for larger frogs, but care is need to ensure all are eaten and none survive to adulthood to turn the tables on the frogs!
Very small, newly moulted (white) mealworms (Tenebrio molitor) may be eaten by frogs, but separating them is fiddly. Large mealworm larvae are too big for dartfrogs. Buffaloworms (Alphitobius laevigatus) are taken by Phyllobates bicolor and P. terribilis, but not with great relish.
Mites are good food source for smaller frogs and froglets. There are thousands of species of mite, virtually impossible to identify. Brightly coloured species may be distasteful to frogs. Culturing mites is easy to do by accident (in your Drosophila cultures), not as easy to do intentionally. Mites tend to like damp conditions.
Dartfrogs love springtails and they are almost indispensable for rearing
newly metamorphosed froglets. Springtails can be culture on barbecue charcoal
(not briquettes) kept in a sealed box with a humid atmosphere. Sprinkle with
ReadyBrek, couscous, rice, pasta or fishfood and harvest by washing the insects
off the charcoal through a fine net. Not all species will grow on charcoal and
some must be grown on compost, tree-fern panels, etc.
Hatchling stick insects may be taken by frogs but don't move much and are often ignored. If they survive, they will eat all of your plants!
Sweepings or "field plankton" are wild insects gathered by sweeping through vegetation such as long grass with a fine net. Good for diversifying frogs diets, but be careful of areas which may have been sprayed with herbicides/pesticides and make sure you remove large spiders, centipedes, bees, wasps, etc before feeding.
Termites
Termites are currently illegal in the UK. Although a very good food source for dart frogs (and commonly used in the USA) you should not keep or feed your dart frogs Termites in the UK.
Very little is known about amphibian vitamin requirements since all research has been done on birds and mammals. However, it is clear that frogs require vitamin D3 and some vitamin A to absorb calcium, and probably lots of other vitamins too. A varied diet together with a vitamin-mineral supplement such as Nutrobal (Vetark) or Repton (Medivet) is always a good idea.
The greater waxmoth (Galleria mellonella) and the lesser waxmoth (Achroia grisella) can both be cultured in the same way. The smaller species are a better size for dartfrogs. Both types can be cultured on a medium consisting of approximately:
Add enough honey and glycerin (= glycerol) to produce a dry, crumbly mixture
(*not* sticky).
Add crumpled up paper towels to the culture for pupation.
Cultures need lots of ventilation or you get condensation and they go mouldy.
Whatever
culture vessel you use, bear in mind that the larvae have an amazing ability
to chew through almost anything that is not made of either glass or metal.
Woodlice are easy to culture on compost covered with brown non-printed cardboard and fed ReadyBrek and vegetable peelings, apple cores, etc. Keep them damp but not wet. British species such as Porcellio scaber are acceptable to larger frogs such as Phyllobates species. "Tropical" white woodlice such as Trichorhina tomentosa can be cultured in the same way but have several advantages: they are smaller, softer and reproduce more quickly under ideal conditions (25-30°C). They are eagerly eaten by Mantellas and dartfrogs.
Frogs will sometimes take small worms such as whiteworms (Enchytraeus), but most frogs refuse them as they do not move in an attractive way to induce feeding behaviour.
Dendroworld: FAQ:
Food
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