| FOOD ITEMS |
| FOOD ITEMS |
|
Food In the wild, Dendrobatids
almost undoubtedly eat anything small enough, and get a huge diversity
of insects in their diet. In captivity, this is sadly reduced to, but
a few meager items, which can be easily cultured. A few of the items
regularly used to feed Dart Frogs are crickets, fruit flies, wax worms,
springtails, and flour beetle larvae. If you are lucky enough to live
in an area where you can collect wild termites without worrying about
pesticides, this is also an excellent food source. However if you are
like most people, you will need to resort to either breeding fruit flies
or crickets. Crickets are widely used in the dart frog hobby, but as anyone who has more than a few frogs can tell you, the expense adds up much too quickly. Buying crickets, on average, costs $10 per 1000 crickets, even for pinheads. As anyone who has tried feeding crickets can tell you, a thousand crickets does not go very far. Now if you’re willing to put up with some of the noise, the smell, and the occasional escapee, buying adult crickets and breeding them can significantly reduce your food bill, especially for those who use upwards of 8000 crickets a week. Here are some of the advantages of using crickets. At a very conservative estimate, if you figure that a female cricket can produce 100 eggs, that would equate to 10,000 pinheads produced for the same cost of $10 per 1000 crickets. True pinhead crickets work very well for some of the smallest froglets, and bulk them up quickly, so that they can take other food items. The pinheads can also be raised to the appropriate size for the range of darts from D. pumilio froglets, to adult P. terribilis. Most people don’t want to mess with the hassle, smell and noise of crickets in their house, but for those who are willing to put up with it, here are a few suggestions to cut down on the food bill. There are more than enough websites out there that can explain how to breed crickets, so I’m not going to go into detail about that. If you seriously want to breed large amounts of crickets, here are a few tips. Finding a good supplier is essential to your success and ease of maintenance. Most crickets that are produced by the large farms are raised up as quickly as possible. Given this, a cricket nymph reaches adulthood when it gets its wings, which takes about 42 days. However, their optimal egg-producing period starts at 48 days. If you buy adult crickets from a breeder, you are more than likely getting crickets that are at least 55 days old. Most places will not want to pass up this optimal breeding period to increase their own production. Most will even insist that they do not lay the crickets, but if you have raised them through the entire cycle, you can tell whether or not they are old. This is the reason for quick die-offs and smelly containers. Finding a supplier that will provide you with 48-day-old crickets will help you in keeping the smell down, and you shouldn’t have any deaths unless food and water are not provided. Fresh crickets do NOT die, despite what the cricket suppliers tell you. So, most places won’t do that for you, fine. Instead of trying to get the most out of the breeders, and keeping the smelly dying crickets around, just get rid of them at the end of 1 week. You will still have a decent laying period, even with old crickets, and after a week, start anew. This, in my opinion, is better than getting crickets that are under 42 days old. If you get them that young, you will still need to raise them for at least another week before you get any decent laying from them. So that doubles the amount of time you want to be keeping them. The key is to start with a large enough group. If you are spending $50 a week on feeders, try spending $20 a week on breeders. That already cuts the food bill by more than half, and you will get more than twice the yield of $50 worth of feeders. Here are a few more tips that I’ve found helpful.
Fruit flies are probably the easiest food item to culture. There are a lot of recipes for culturing medium available over the Internet, and there are also many companies that sell pre-made fruit fly culturing medium. There are two species that are most often used for culturing, Drosophila melanogaster & Drosophila hydei. Both can be obtained in flightless forms so that you don’t have flies flying everywhere. D. melanogaster is smaller than D. hydei, and has a faster life cycle. When culturing fruit flies, it is important to be able to allow the cultures to cycle. The cycle for D. melanogaster from an egg to a fly is about 10 days. They adult flies can lay eggs for about 7 days after that. If you are going to feed them everyday, you should have a different culture to feed out of for each day until the flies in the 1st culture has had a chance to renew the cycle. That way, by the time you reach the 1st culture again, the adult flies have already been laying eggs for a week. To keep this cycle going, you are going to need to reserve some flies from each batch that is being fed out for that day, and use them to start new cultures each day until there are enough cultures to maintain the cycle. This is an ongoing process, so if your needs are small, keep the cultures small, and vice-versa. Cultures may last about a month so you will also need to start cultures to replace the ones that need to be thrown out as they get old. Wax worms are another food
item that are easy to culture. It is more involved than fruit flies,
as there aren’t many pre-made wax worm foods available, so finding a
recipe for wax worm medium on the Internet is usually be only way to
get information. The worms should be used as a supplement to vary their
regular diet. If one intends on using wax worms, you will most likely
need to start with large worms, and get them to pupate and turn into
moths to breed yourself. Wax worms small enough for Dendrobatids are
not commonly available, and grow rapidly, so buying them in appropriate
sizes and quantities is usually problematic. Springtails are widely used
in Europe as a food source for Dendrobatids, especially for froglets
of small species. Springtails or Collembola are tiny arthropods that
live in moist conditions, usually feeding on decaying plant matter and
fungi. They can be useful in raising the smallest of froglets, but anecdotal
evidence suggests that there may be problems with protozoan infections
associated with the long-term use of collembola. Confused Flour Beetle and
Rice Flour Beetle larvae has also been used for feeding Dendrobatids.
They are highly susceptible to moisture, so they must be fed on a dry
surface, and any excess should be removed from the enclosures after
feeding. Use of these items should be restricted to occasional feedings
in a varied diet, and should not be considered a staple food source.
|
|
All contents copyright 2001 by Arachnokulture. All rights reserved.
|