Guest post by Wuffielover
The Frog Factory, or, Even Rabbits Don’t Breed Like This!
Keeping tiny, adorable frogs in nicely planted and landscaped vivariums is all very well, but one day, you’ll feel the urge to do something more. To make MORE tiny, adorable frogs. Or you might not, and what happened to me might happen to you, namely, you get some dart frogs and they start making babies no matter what YOU might have to say about it. Although, I confess, what I had to say was, “Oooo, EGGS! YAY!”
The best thing about breeding these guys (or the worst, depending on if you WANT them to breed or not) is that if you keep them in optimal conditions, they will start to breed more or less without any involvement from you. A lot of frog species need an artificial ‘rain chamber’ to simulate a rainy season and induce them to breed in captivity, but dart frogs just need humidity, temperatures in the mid-seventies Fahrenheit, adequate food, and enough cover to hide in. Since you have to give them these things ANYWAY, dart frogs are pretty easy to breed. Well…mostly. These:
are my D. imitator. I’ve had them for more than a year, and there are two girls and one boy (I can tell because the male is skinny and calls, and the females are fatter and quiet; this is true for most frogs, actually). They were bred and given to me by a friend of mine. He is overflowing with imitators. They breed constantly in his tanks; he started with a trio and now has more than twenty. And since the parents raise the babies in the tanks(more on that later), there’s not much he can do to stop them. The ones he gave to me, on the other hand, have yet to raise a single successful clutch, although I hear the male call and they have laid a few eggs, all of which went moldy and bad. Hrmph. Darn persnickety frogs…
However, back in August I acquired a pair of these:
Green and Black Dart Frogs, D. auratus. I’d barely had them a month before they started laying eggs, and they haven’t stopped since. Every two weeks or so I’ll peek in and find the male and the female together in one of the little white plastic bathroom cups (just disposable ones from the grocery store) tucked into the corner of their vivarium (they seem to prefer these, although they have laid clutches on the leaf litter as well). A couple of hours later the cup will contain three or four (once they had five!) little round objects that look like bubbles with black centers. These are the eggs. After a few days the black center will start to grow a tail, and after about a week they look like this:
Some people pull the eggs out right after they’re laid, but I leave them in the tank until they actually hatch, it’s easier that way. The first clutch my auratus laid, though, I was clueless about how to tell when the eggs HAD actually hatched. I kept asking my friend how to tell, and all he would say was “You’ll know.” I agonized about it, spending a lot of time examining the eggs, wondering, have they hatched? Can I pull the tadpoles now? Now?? Now??? It turns out, though, it’s easier than I thought. When the eggs hatch, the little ‘bubble’ that the tadpole has been in collapses. I really wish someone had told me that. Grr.
Anyway, after the tadpoles have come out of the eggs, you have about a day to grab them before the daddy frog takes over. Dart frogs, you see, have some of the best parental instincts of any frog. Instead of laying their eggs and abandoning them to nature’s whims, the male parent hangs around after the eggs are laid, guarding them.
After they hatch, he actually scoops the tadpoles up onto his back, carries them to the nearest body of water that suits them (the tadpoles will actually refuse to dismount if they don’t like the water), and drops them in. For some types of dart frogs, like my auratus, their job ends there and the tadpoles are left to fend for themselves. For others, like my imitators, the parents still have work to do. The tadpoles of these types of frogs are raised in very small bodies of water, as small as a thimble in some cases (usually the axils of bromeliads). In order to feed them the father calls the mother frog over and induces her to lay some unfertilized eggs, which are the tadpoles’ main food source. The latter type of dart frog, known as ‘egg-feeders,’ are nearly impossible to raise artificially and must be left in the tank. The former type, the non-egg feeders, have the opposite problem- unless the tank is carefully laid out, the tadpoles will usually not survive in the tank and have to be removed and raised by people. My male auratus transported one of the tadpoles from their first clutch before I pulled it; unfortunately, there’s no body of water in their tank. I never did figure out where he put it, but it wasn’t on his back the next day, and since I haven’t seen any little frogs in there (it’s more than 2 months since the other tads in that clutch morphed), well… the tadpole probably didn’t make it. I put a little cup of water in there after that, to prevent future accidents. But provided you can get there ahead of the parents, raising the tadpoles isn’t that hard.
Each tad has to be decanted (I used to be REALLY scared of hurting the tadpoles while doing this, fiddling with straws, turkey basters, etc…now I just pull them out with my fingers. Slimy.) from the remains of their egg (it turns into clear jelly after they hatch) into their own individual cup; if you keep two tads in the same cup, one will stunt the growth of the other. No, really! I kept two from the first clutch together and one became a frog more than a month after the first one. Here’s my tadpole shelf:
I buy a gallon of spring water and keep each cup about half full. Every couple of days I drop a tadpole bite (little brown food pellet) in. I used to put a bit of hair algae in each cup, but I ran out, so I’ve put oak leaves in the last couple of batches (they keep the water tannic, which the tads like, and give them something to munch on between tadpole bites). The tadpoles go from this
then climb out of the cups after becoming this absolutely tiiiny thing
in about two and a half months. Seriously. The baby froglets are sooooo small. I was certain I was going to kill the first batch. They can’t even eat fruit flies for the first week or so, they need springtails (a tiny, near-microscopic bug that eats decaying plant matter) instead. But, somehow, they did NOT die, and indeed, grew! Now, 2 months after my first group morphed, they look like this (sorry, that’s the best I could do with a rapidly fleeing, uncooperative frog that just had a penny dropped near it; it’s a near-miracle that I snagged the first one with the dime):
I keep the babies in latching plastic storage containers, with sphagnum moss and oak leaves in the bottom, and a chunk of bark for them to hide under. It stays nice and damp and works well, although at first I was paranoid that they would find some gap in the lids and escape.
And that’s the story of how I went from two auratus to more than a dozen, with another dozen tadpoles, six eggs in the tank, and more coming all the time, in only 6 months. I’m not yet at the point where I want them to just STOP already, mainly because I work at an exotic pet store where I can take the froglets once they’re big enough. And it’s a good thing, since I can’t work out how to make them stop anyway!
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