Guest post by Black Bear
The Long Awaited Frogblog
I’ve been promising Robin a blog about my non-furry pets for nearly as long as she’s been needing guestblog entries, and that day is finally here. I’d been putting it off, partly because I knew I was going to move them to a new and better terrarium in the fall, and partly because I had a suspicion that the old terrarium would be…shall we say…recycled in some way? At last both prophesies have come to pass, and so now it’s my pleasure to introduce you to the dart frog hobby!
The first obvious question is, Just What Are Dart Frogs? Dart frogs are exclusively New World amphibians, native to the rainforests of Central and South America. There are a couple of different genera that are colloquially called “dart frogs,” but all are pretty similar—small (under 3″) frogs, terrestrial (as opposed to aquatic,) generally very brightly colored, which exude a toxin through their skin as a passive defense mechanism. This is where they get the name “dart” frog, as one genus—Phylobates—produces a toxin so powerful that the natives in its part of Columbia use frog poison to coat their hunting darts. One adult P. terribilis produces enough toxin to kill about 50 people—no joke. But if you learn nothing else from this blog post, please remember this one thing: EVEN THE MOST TOXIC SPECIES OF DART FROG IS HARMLESS IN CAPTIVTY.
No, I’m not kidding. Here’s the deal. All dart frogs produce a mild poison, as I said above. But in the wild, a dart frog’s diet is primarily made up of ants. The ants themselves are pretty powerful producers of toxins, which they in turn get from the plants they eat. So these toxic chemicals go from plant to ant and ant to frog, becoming more potent and refined in the process. Now, if you take P. terribilis out of his native jungle (not a kind thing to do) and feed him fruitflies in your terrarium, eventually he will stop producing deadly poison because he’s not getting the raw material for it from his diet anymore. (He will also probably die of a bacterial infection. It’s my understanding that terribilis is particularly prone to infection, which reinforces the theory that one purpose of evolving such potent skin toxins is to serve as a sort of antiseptic shield for the frog. Amphibians have very sensitive and porous skin; so if terribilis loses his poison, he’s in a bad way. Wild-caught Phylobates species thus are not recommended in the pet trade, for obvious reasons.)
Most of the frogs that ARE generally available to the hobbyist are captive bred, genus Dendrobates (the whole dart frog family are called “dendrobatids,” meaning tree-climbers.) Within that genus there are an incredible number of species, in every color of the rainbow. Some are easier to keep than others, and so for my first attempt at keeping dart frogs I went with a classic beginner frog, Dendrobates leucomelas.
Bumblebee dart frogs, or “leuks,” are one of the easiest frogs to keep. They’re hardy, they’re active (ie, they don’t spend all their time hiding from you) and they breed easily, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. Plus, unlike most darts, the males have a loud trilling call that’s really quite charming. (You can hear it here; the video is terrible, but the recording’s not bad.) So I went to the reptile show last November intending to buy one dart frog…and they were so mercilessly cute I had to get a pair. (As they’re not sex-able until they mature, I’m still not entirely sure if I’ve got two boys, or a boy and a girl. I know I’ve got at least one boy, because I can hear singing from the tank occasionally.)
Dart frogs are actually fairly easy pets once you’re set up, but being amphibians they do need specific environmental conditions, and they DO need live food. Reptiles can be trained to eat killed prey; not so frogs. If it’s not moving, it ain’t food in their tiny brains. So to get set up for Norman and Saxon’s arrival, I’d already done quite a bit of prep work.
I’ve kept tropical fish since I was about 8, I think; so between my garage and my parents’ there were several disused aquariums available for me to transform into Frog City. I picked a 5 gallon to start, because I wanted to be able to find the frogs easily when they were small—just in case anything went wrong. Dart frogs require 80-90% humidity at all times, so I put a layer of gravel in the bottom, then a layer of fiberglass window screen, then a layer of soil (ground up coconut husks make great bacteria-free soil, and it’s a readily available product in exotic petshops.) This way, the water I put in from above with my mister can percolate down through the soil, then seep back up as needed by the plants in the tank. Of course the frogs need plants, too—they provide cover and hiding places, as well as making the tank look nice and natural. The plants need light, but direct sunlight is bad for rainforest frogs—they need diffuse light—so I also bought a small full-spectrum light to hang over the tank. Dart frogs need temperatures between 70-80 degrees, so a heater isn’t necessary (though I did get one in case of some kind of emergency over the winter.)
The food was trickier. As babies, they were too small to eat even the smallest of mealworms, so I had to go for the classic dart frog food source—fruitflies. The ones available in the pet trade are flightless (making them more fruitwalks, really) so not too hard to work with. I buy them in 32 oz deli containers that have fruitfly food in the bottom, topped with excelsior for them to climb around and lay eggs on. One 32 oz culture will last me about a month before the colony kind of dies off. If I had more space I’d culture them myself, but as it is I just buy them ready-to-go. When it’s feeding time, I tap the culture on the table so all the flies fall down into the bottom (they haven’t got a whole lot of staying power) and then open it and shake some out into a second container, then slam the first one shut before any more of them make it up to the top and out to freedom. The second cup contains frog vitamin powder and/or calcium, which I shake the flies around in until they’re coated. (I refer to this as “applying condiments.”) Then I just tap the flies from cup #2 into the tank, and the frogs hunt them down at their leisure.
So I had the leuks for a year, and I felt like I had them pretty well under control, so I started looking for a new species that I could put in the 5 gallon when I moved Norm and Sax to a 10 gallon this fall. (One of the cardinal rules of dart frogs, by the way, is do NOT mix species in the same tank. They can fight, they can sometimes crossbreed, and they can cannibalize each other if there’s a size differential. Remember, moving = food.) Anyway, I lit, perhaps unwisely, on one of the “thumbnail” species: Dendrobates amazonicus. They’re called thumbnails because they’re smaller than most dart frogs, maxing out at around 3/4″. As babies, they are ridiculously tiny; my three are all small enough to sit on a dime with room to spare, and their toes are about as fine as my hair. Incredible. I’ve not named them yet—2 are nearly identical, and all 3 are so little that I feel I’d better not get too attached until they’re bigger. So right now they’re One, Two and Three, named in the order that I see them in the tank on any given day. More updates as they grow, I promise!
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