- Hi guys and girls, I'm ReefMan.
It's the holiday season and hopefully
you're enjoying time with your family.
I thought that we would take a break from reef tanks
and talk about poison dart frogs instead.
So, for poison dart frogs
you really don't need a lot of space.
I'm using a 60 gallon cube aquarium,
it's two feet on a side by two feet.
Don't have a lot of vertical plants in it.
I think I should have more but my frogs are okay.
So mostly it's just on the ground here.
The important parts for poison dart frogs is that
they're rain forest critters,
and so you need a lot of humidity.
In my tank I'll show you at the top
I have automated misters that come in,
so these misting heads.
They're very easy to install,
the brand that I have is MistKing
but you could really do whatever you want.
And you wanna keep the humidity up around
like 80 or 90% in your tank.
Just because they are amphibians
and they dry out if you don't have them high.
so they do like bromiliads, this is a bromiliad.
This is a neorogelia bromiliad,
and you can see they turn red in the center.
The frogs actually live down in the leaf axils
and they lay eggs, and they will actually breed in your tank
they're very easy animals to breed
if you want to do that kind of a thing.
The other basic care requirement that they need
aside from places to hide is food.
And so you might see in this video
some fruit flies crawling around.
You can just, well not you can,
you have to grow your own fruit flies.
So this is a fruit fly culture, get it in the frame.
And basically they're
genetically mutated to fruit flies
just like you would grow in a genetics course
where they don't fly.
There's two different kinds of fruit flies.
The ones that I feed my frogs,
my frogs are called Ranitomeya imitator
which are a thumbnail poison dart frog.
You won't see any of them they're great at hiding
I'll put pictures throughout the video.
So there are two different kinds of poison dart frog
there are sort of the bigger ones,
things like dendrobates,
Tinctorius the blue poison dart frog,
Azureus is the blue one,
Tinctorius is a different but related species.
Leucomelas, the bumblebee poison dart frog.
These are much bigger easier to take care of.
They take larger food items,
so small crickets, even pinhead crickets.
There's larger fruit flies called hydei
so those are the ones you would feed those frogs.
The thumbnail frogs all of the species
in the Ranitomeya genus
are going to take
these smaller fruit flies the melanogaster fruit flies.
Both of them you can get genetically mutated
so they don't fly,
and you'll be able to breed them pretty easily on your own.
By far, the fruit flies are the hardest part
of poison dart frogs.
You don't need to worry too much about heating.
Your house is probably good as far as heat goes
you'll have to worry much more about humidity.
So, as I mentioned I have the misters,
if you don't have the misters
you'll need to mist once or twice a day.
And the heat should just be upper 70s
maybe real low 80s for most species
there are some exceptions some frogs
from lowland areas obviously
will need some warmer temperatures and so on,
but they're all pretty much in the 75 to 80 degree range.
You can get poison dart frogs online
just like you can get coral and fish.
The ones that I have are from a company in Canada,
they do imports though.
It's called Understory Enterprises
and they do a lot of captive breeding
for a lot of different species out of Peru.
My imitator are from captive bred,
but the bloodline originally is from Peru
and there are hundreds of different variations
and local things just the same way
you can get designer clownfish.
Although, designer poison dart frogs
aren't really a thing.
It's more, if you go from this valley
then they're more blue than the next Valley over
is more green and say stuff like that.
So yeah, poisoned dart frogs, take a look at them
they're really easy to take care of.
And as I mentioned before they breed very easily.
If you want to actually sell the offspring
it's something you can do online
all the forums have sort of for sale things.
Unlike fish, poison dart frogs if they're healthy
and you're taking care of them and feeding them enough,
they pretty much are going to be breeding in your tank.
And in this bromeliad I just know
because I've seen the eggs, there are some tadpoles
but I don't take them out in mine
I just sort of let the colony do its own thing in here.
So yeah, another interesting thing if you like reef tanks
you might be interested in poison dart frogs
because you can really do a lot of
planted tank kind of stuff.
I have these two bromiliads, I have this large one
in the middle of the tank
but also a smaller one down here
that the frogs sometimes use.
But then the rest of the plants are all miniature orchids
and nothing is flowering right now,
but they do flower in my tank
and it's always nice to see flowers
so something to consider as well.
A lot of miniature orchids take the same sort of humidity
and temperature requirements as a poison dart frog.
So yeah, I thought it would be interesting
to show you another hobby of mine.
A lot of people who have poison dart frogs
also have reef tanks for whatever reason.
So, I don't know how much it goes in the other direction
but yeah, I thought it would be interesting.
So if you enjoyed, don't forget to Like and subscribe.
And remember for a relaxing time make it Suntory time.