Caring for frogs

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Caring for frogs and building terrariums

Many people get frustrated with their green algae-filled aquariums. What they need is a terrarium with some dart frogs instead of fish. There's no pumps, no heaters, no filters, and no green water. Dart frogs are surprisingly easy to keep. They are diurnal which means they are active during the day and they do best at room temperature (anywhere in the 70s. Dropping into the 60s at night is fine. Just don't let the terrarium lights heat the tank to more than 80). They also have amazing social and breeding behaviors so they make fascinating additions to a terrarium. They come in a wide variety of sizes and colors and they are very safe. While it’s true that some Indian tribes used a few species of dart frog as a source of poison, the vast majority of species are not nearly as toxic. In fact, when raised in captivity they are not toxic at all because they obtain their poisons from insects in their native habitat.

Here's some pictures of the 59 gallon terrarium I have in my office at work. There's three pairs of leucomelas living here. The tank has Riccia on the ground, on the waterfall, and floating in the water. There's also some ferns and the large green plants are Anubias barteri var. nana. I now sell plants, Java moss, and Riccia on the supplies page.

The simplest terrarium. The simplest terrariums are just a 10 gallon fish tank with a wet paper towel in the bottom (always include something for them to hide in like film canisters or cocohut). These are actually a very safe way to keep frogs. The paper towel will need changed often. Simple substrates that last longer are sphagnum moss, peat moss, or cocofiber. Cocofiber is my favorite and you can find it at your local hydroponics store. When setting up a new terrarium it should be left for a few weeks to let all the microbial activity settle down (especially with sphagnum moss). It's just like cycling a fish tank. You can get away with placing your frogs on a brand new terrarium substrate 9 times out of 10 but it's safer to let the terrarium settle for a week first. Fancier substrates with drainage that will last a lot longer are shown below. Several pieces of driftwood and a cocohut round out the decorations. I put Java moss or Riccia on the substrate. I get them both from my fish tanks. Java moss grows really well and spreads all over everything, but can grow too tall unless there are some frogs trampling it down. Riccia is great no matter what, but is much more sensitive. For some reason, Riccia does much better with frogs on it. If you remove the frogs from the tank, the Riccia can mold over within a few days! I also like using live sphagnum moss. Sometimes the dry sphagnum moss you use for the substrate will sprout and the plant is actually a very nice bottom cover. The tank will need hand-misted once every day or two. A top from the pet store will work but they usually don't fit well. They have a plastic strip in the back that lets moisture and fruit flies out (and maybe frogs!). This can be taped off with duct tape to seal it. If you're handy at cutting glass, it's best to make your own top that fits perfectly, like the one shown below. Ace Hardware will cut the glass for you (places like Lowe's and Home Depot are horrible for glass). Ace also sells the type called "Double Strength" which fits aquarium hinges perfectly. The hinge material and handle can be purchased at drsfostersmith.com. I use the hinge but not the aquarium handles. Instead, I prefer to use a cabinet handle from a hardware store and silicon it to the top, as shown below. The advantage of this is that there is no gap created between the top and the tank which is what happens when you use an aquarium handle.

Here are some very simple 2.5g tanks I use for baby frogs. I have a 4 foot rack that holds 56 of them. I just put an inch or two of cocofiber on the bottom and Riccia on top of that. You can see that the top part of the Riccia dried out and died but the bottom part is starting to spread where it is touching the substrate. You have to mist Riccia every day while it is in this stage. Once it fills in it doesn't need misted as often and becomes very hardy. I have put some pictures of mature Riccia with baby frogs on it below.

Feeding your frogs. The main diet of Dart frogs in captivity is wingless fruit flies and pinhead crickets. I'll describe raising fruit flies here. The wingless part makes this extremely simple. Put some vitamin/calcium dust into a plastic cup (RepCal and Herptivite, available on my supplies page), shake some flies into it, and shake them a bit. Your flies are now dusted and ready to shake into your terrariums. You should feed young frogs daily. Adult frogs can skip a day or a weekend without a problem. If you go on vacation just take the lid off your fly culture and put it in the terrarium (don't do this all the time, the frogs really need those vitamin and calcium supplements). Once a week you’ll need to start a new culture. This takes five minutes. Put some dry medium into a plastic container (1/3 cup), add grape juice or water (1/2 cup), and shake it a little to mix it up. Wait a couple minutes for it to solidify. Then sprinkle a tiny bit of activated baker's yeast on top (this acts as a natural mold inhibitor) and throw in a crumpled paper towel (or a coffee filter). Then pour several hundred flies in and shut the lid. Between one and two weeks later this culture will start producing hundreds or thousands of new flies. Each culture keeps producing for several weeks, but it’s good to start a new culture every week so that you have overlapping ages. You can buy culture medium from Carolina Biological Supply (www.carolina.com; Formula 4-24 Instant Medium, Plain, a case is cat# 17-3204). You can also buy medium (or actual cultures) from vendors at your local reptile show or from me. Alternatively, you can make it yourself. The recipe is 3 boxes of potato flakes (2 pound boxes), 12 cups of sugar, and a 1.5 cups of brewers yeast from amazon.com or your local feed store. This will make about 130 cultures. My source for the fly containers is Superior Enterprise (www.superiorenterprise.com; 32 oz insect containers, case of 240, cat#IN-32). If you don't want to buy 240 at a time, you can buy smaller quantities from me on my supplies page.

If you know of better sources for supplies let me know and I'll post them here for everybody.

Fancy backgrounds. First, don't feel like you need a background at all. In fact, none of my tanks have fancy backgrounds! But I was intrigued about how to make them and I played around with a variety of ways to do it and finally settled on my favorite. By the time I figured out my favorite method, I was done setting up all my tanks! Anyway, this method is a mixture of lots of different ideas kindly put on the internet by other hobbyists. This background is made out of black polyurethane foam from drsfostersmith.com. Read all the way through before starting so that you understand each step. At the very end I've put a simplified sequence of events. To start, lay the tank on the side that will be the background. Once you spray the foam you have to work very fast so figure out your plan first. You'll be placing driftwood into the foam so place your pieces first to make sure you like their positioning. Then pull them out of the tank and place them in front of the tank in the same arrangement so that you can remember how to put them back in the tank later. Now get some coco-fiber from a hydroponics store or some peat moss (this is not the long strand sphagnum moss, this is ground up dark brown peat moss from a gardening store). My favorite is coco-fiber with some peat mixed in (the big bag of cocofiber and what it looks like in my hand is shown below). Make your mix up in a bucket and set it next to the tank. Now you're ready to go unless you'd like to put some pvc pipes into the background. These are used to hold 35mm film canisters for thumbnails to lay their eggs. Use 1.25" pipe, a little longer than a film canister. Paint the pipe forest green or some other color with acrylic paint. If you use pipes, place them in the tank before spraying the foam and spray the foam around the pipes. Now with your pipes in place, spray the foam all over the back wall (which is laying on the ground). Then immediately (you have to be done with everything in 5 minutes) place your driftwood onto the foam. Then immediately throw your coco/peat mix onto the foam, about a one inch thick layer all over everything. Gently pat the coco/peat down onto the foam and you're all done for the day. The tank will look like this at this point (these are 20H horizontals):

Let the tank sit there for several days while the foam cures. In fact, sometimes the foam shrinks away from the edges a little bit and you need to fix some things first. Sometimes the weight of the driftwood will actually pull the foam background off of the glass wall! So there are some things to do to prevent this. One is to silicon a few pieces of driftwood to the glass before spraying the foam. This will hold the foam against the glass. The other is to fix the edges after the foam has cured. Just shoot a little more foam around the edges and put some more coco fiber on it. Wait a few more days again and now you're done. Take the tank outside and dump all the excess coco/peat mix off of the background. These two tanks show how critical the timing is. I put the foam in both of them at the same time and then added the coco/peat mix to the one on the left first. I ran out, mixed up some more, and then did the one on the right. With even a few minutes delay it doesn't stick as well to the foam. You might want to go for this look though because it looks like rocks, but I prefer more complete coverage.

How much foam do you need? One 31 ounce can of black handifoam covers 800 square inches. A 10 gallon vertical background is 200 square inches (you can do 4 tanks with one can). A 10 horizontal is 240, a 20H vertical is 288, and a 20H horizontal is 384.

1) Paint your pvc pipes with acrylic paint. (wait 24 hours)
2) Lay the tank with the back wall on the ground.
3) Use silicon to attach your pvc pipes and larger pieces of driftwood to the glass. (wait 24 hours)
4) Prepare your cocofiber and/or peat moss mixture and smaller pieces of driftwood.
5) Spray the foam all over the back glass, around the pvc pipes and driftwood. Immediately put the smaller pieces of driftwood into the foam and then immediately cover everything with a thick layer of cocofiber/peat mix. Gently pat it down into the foam. (wait 3 days)
6) Spray more foam into any gaps created by the foam shrinking away from the edges. Immediately cover this new foam with cocofiber/peat mix. (wait 3 days)
7) Dump off the excess cocofiber and you're finished!

Fancier substrate. A layer of pea gravel from a garden store or clay balls from a hydroponics store can be used as the very bottom layer. Then you place a piece of fiberglass screen over the top, then put something that will hold moisture on top of that. You can use either long strand sphagnum moss as above, or use coco-fiber and/or peat moss. Or use coco-fiber with a little long strand sphagnum moss on top of that. That's what I've done with the two tanks below. Another option is to use what the Atlanta Botanical Gardens use. The ABG mix is 2 parts tree fern fiber, 1 part peat moss, 2 parts cocofiber, 1 part charcoal, and 2 parts orchid bark.

After the substrate is in, pour water into the tank until the clay ball layer is filled with water. That way water will constantly wick up into the cocofiber layer and keep it moist. Here it is after the initial planting. I placed a couple pieces of driftwood and a cocohut on the bottom. Then I covered the bottom with Riccia. I then scattered some Java moss on the bottom and on the background. The Java moss on the background will look awesome later. I've decided that Riccia is my favorite plant for the bottom. Java moss gets too tall unless you have big frogs to trample it down. Riccia stays flat and looks great. Although Java moss is much hardier than Riccia.

OK, here is one of them after a couple months. See how tall the java moss is getting? This tank needs some big frogs like a tinctorius, azureus, auratus, or leucomelas. This is a good size tank for these frogs.

But here are two terrariums that have frogs in them. The java moss does not get tall at all, but it still spreads all over everything. In the first picture there is actually a cocohut in the back right corner of the terrarium but it is hard to see because the java grew over the top of it! In the second picture, the java climbed up the piece of cork bark in the back and also covered up a cocohut on the ground.

Here's a 20H horizontal decorated by my helper, Conner. It's got Riccia on the ground, java moss on the cocohut, Selaginella on the far right, some Suzy Wong fern in the back and Anubias barteri in the foreground and in the back. Notice the frog poking his head out?

20H tank $27 (a 10 gallon would be $8 to $10)
3 extra small driftwood from superiorenterprise.com in background $3 (comes 25/box)
1 small driftwood from drsfostersmith.com in background $7
1 medium driftwood from drsfostersmith.com in background $10
glass for top $7 (1/2 of a 28x30 sheet from Ace Hardware)
Hinge from drsfostersmith.com $4 (1/3 of a $13 strip)
knob $0.50
Handi foam from drsfostersmith.com $10 (1/2 of a $20 can)
coco-fiber or peat $5 (1/4 of a $20 bag)
leca balls or gravel $5 (1/6 of a $30 bag)
long strand sphagnum moss $2
screen $1

Then there's decorations. Typical is another medium and two extra small driftwoods ($12), a cocohut ($5), bromeliads ($5 each), java moss, Fica pumila, and other assorted plants. So let's say $20 here. Total is about $100.

Finally, the light source is critical. For this I recommend the 24" freshwater power compact from drsfostersmith.com which is another $65 with shipping. So the grand total with a really nice light is $165. You can do much cheaper lights if you want, see below.

Lighting: The key to plant growth is having the right bulbs. Most bulbs with a Kelvin rating of 5000 to 6700 is perfect. The cheapest way to do this is buy a four foot long shop light (get the T-8 electronic ballast variety rather than the standard T-12 magnetic ballast). These are typically $17 at Home Depot but I found them on sale one time for $5 and cleaned out two whole stores worth!! (This turned out to be a bummer by the way, the ballasts died at a rate of about one per week for two years. Now I'm replacing the ballasts as they die with a GE UltraMax T8 ballast that is about $21.) Also, at Home Depot you can find the 4' bulbs. I usually get a T-8 5000K bulb and a T-8 6700K bulb for each dual strip light. The bulbs cost $5 to $8 each. This is how I have all of the lights on all of my aquariums and terrariums (a few have power compacts). However, a four foot shop light does not look particularly nice on top of a 10 gallon vertical terrarium (or a 24" wide 20 gallon high terrarium). So either set up 4 feet worth of terrariums and put one shop light on top or switch to power compacts. For 10 gallon vertical tanks I use the 18 watt mini and for the 20H tanks I use the 24" freshwater power compact (Both from drsfostersmith.com). Be absolutely sure to order the "Freshwater" version. The Freshwater has a 6700K bulb and is perfect. Be careful about the temperature of the tank. Frogs are very sensitive to heat so put a thermometer in the tank and make sure the temperature never exceeds 80°F. The light is the usual culprit so buy the legs for the power compact to keep the light an inch or so off the tank (the legs are sold separately for some reason). If you're using some other kind of light just be sure to keep it raised up a little bit. Many frogs like it much hotter than 80°F in nature, but not in our tanks at home. I think this is because we are not providing enough ventilation in our tanks. The hobby is young but we're learning! The initial thought was a tightly sealed tank to keep the humidity up, but our tanks are probably too humid and they need much more ventilation, especially if they are getting hot. Remember, a hot day in a greenhouse is much worse than a hot day outside the greenhouse with a nice breeze going by! In any case, if you're just starting out I would keep it under 80°F. Try to provide a large vent hole somewhere in the top or sides of your tank (covered with screen of course!). By large, I mean at least a couple of inches in diameter. As long as there is water in the base of your terrarium you don't have to worry about the humidity. It will be high enough.

Misting systems. These aren't essential, but they sure are nice. If you just have one tank they aren't worth the money. For example, there is no misting system on the tank in my office that I showed at the very top of this page. But at home where I have 46 tanks, a misting system is essential. I got mine at Ecologic, but I also recently got a different kind of system for my chameleons at herpmist.com and bought some more components for it from mistking.com. The second kind of system is much more expensive but very nice, of course. I haven't tried hooking up more than a few tanks to the second system so I don't know how it compares to my 46 tank system.

Waterfalls and ponds: Adding a waterfall is easy. Just put a water pump under the gravel and attach a hose that goes to the top of the waterfall. Use a ViaAqua model 180, 360, or 480 from drsfostersmith.com. Then fill the tank with water so that the gravel layer is almost completely underwater. The screen and substrate above that is not underwater. You can see the water level in the 59 gallon tank below. It doesn't reach the top of the gravel layer. There is a pump in the back right corner of the tank, under the gravel, that lifts water to the top of the driftwood. The water runs down the driftwood and falls back into the pond. The pond is made by simply not putting gravel or substrate in that area. The screen that separates the gravel and the rest of the substrate is just cut to shape. I have the bottom of this tank drilled and there is a hose with a ball valve at the end so that I can empty it. Then I just add new water by pouring it in from the top with a bucket. I change the water every month or two. Drilling the bottom is not necessary. Instead, you can just siphon the water out.

Verticals: Almost all of my tanks are verticals, although they're a much bigger pain in the butt to make than horizontals. We've worked on several designs trying to figure out how to get air flow across the door to prevent fogging. The simplest (with no air flow) is to take a regular fish tank and cut a piece of glass to fit the bottom 4" to 6". Cut another piece to be the door. Connect them using the hinge from drsfostersmith.com. Then silicon the bottom piece into the tank and you're all done. However, it is very important to realize that when you stand this tank up and put some water in the bottom it might leak all over the place. This has nothing to do with anything that you did wrong. It's because the plastic top to the fish tank may not have been siliconed completely around the top when it was manufactured. So it's the top that's leaking, not your door. Be sure to seal the top with silicon on the inside and outside of the tank before installing your door. Below I've put pictures of various designs that try to get air flow going from the bottom of the door to the top to keep them from fogging. The only design that succeeds has the big gaps above and below the door. These are harder to build (more pieces) but have good ventilation and no fogging.

Here's version 1 with the big gaps (all of these are 20H tanks). This version uses four separate pieces of glass. There is no background, just a piece of cork with java moss on it. The top piece of glass holds the mosquito netting down and holds the latch. Then there's the door, the hinge, and the bottom piece of the door that is siliconed down. Then there's a gap with mosquito netting and finally the bottom piece that is also siliconed in. Note the little pool of water made by just scraping away the gravel. The water level is set by the overflow that is in the back of the tank (the bulkheads can be made from spare pvc parts or bought complete here). Water is always added by the misting system with the excess going out the overflow to the floor drain.

Version 2: This is easier because it only has two pieces of glass instead of four. To get air flow, the top corners were cut off of the bottom piece with the gaps covered by screen. I was hoping the gap around the door would be big enough to provide air flow out the top. It sort of works.

Here's some 10 gallon verticals that I sold with the fancy backgrounds (sorry, I don't sell these anymore, I have no time!)

That's about all the advice I have on building dart frog terrariums. More info can be found in these Dart Frog books.

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