Fear of Clowns

Three of my four new banded D. leucomelas froglets. They are about two months out of the water (meaning two months since they morphed from tadpoles to froglets). They're really tiny.

Sexed pair of adult/sub adult D. azureus. The males are smaller and have broader toe pads.

Sterilizing wood for the vivariums. I had it in a 225° F oven for 3 1/2 or four hours.

Sterilizing live oak leaves for the vivariums. boiled in R/O water for about a half hour.

Here are the plants I've collected so far for my four frog vivariums. As you have to throw out plants that have been exposed to frogs with parasites, I'm waiting until I test the frogs fecals before planting them in with the frogs.

The azureus have not yet figured out they can jump into the petri dish and chow down ... both repeatedly try to nab crickets through the plastic.

The last few seconds of a cricket's life.

Labels: pet food, pets, photos, poison dart frogs

// posted by Erik @ 7/20/2008 08:52:00 PM
permalink | 0 comments | post comment | email post:

Flightless fruit flies are the staple food for most captive dart frogs; I've so far been more successfull with other feeder insects. My cricket ranch is producing hundreds of pinhead crickets.

This is the bedding I removed from the main colony - it's now in a 6 quart Seralite container with some dry catfood, powdered milk and damp sphagnum moss. What else could a baby cricket need?

By the way, I'm watching Dave Letterman interview a very drunk Jack Black at the moment.

I'm not exactly sure what these are - I've read them referred to as bean beetles and bean weevils. They're amazingly easy to culture - all they need is dry black-eyed-peas. No water, no anything else. There were 8 or a dozen individuals in my starter culture - all dead for weeks now. Three days ago, a single beetle emerged, yesterday two dozen, today swarms. I split the "used" beans into two new cultures and added fresh beans to the original culture.

They must emerge from the beans sexually mature as all they do is crawl around and mate with each other.

Here I have a mixture of vermiculite, small pebbles and LECA. On top I've layered damp corrugated cardboard. This is a culture of isopods - similar to pill bugs, rolly-pollies and woodlice - the things that roll up or scatter when you lift up something that hasn't been lifted up in a while. They are all isopods.

This page and video was really helpful to me. Not sure what to try for food, I'm giving them a smorgasbord: watermelon rind, banana peel, yeast, oatmeal and a tortilla.

Covered with a final layer of cardboard as these are the things you see when lifting up something that hasn't been lifted up in a while.

Springtails - another animal you'll only see when looking under things. I'm using charcoal as a medium as their buoyancy allows one to harvest them by flooding the container and scooping a mass of them off the top of the water.

Food for the springtails: yeast and oatmeal.

For my tadpoles, bloodworms. Purchased frozen from a pet store.

I moved my tads to larger containers.

I killed two of my three turquoise and bronze and auratus tadpoles by using straight reverse osmosis water. By osmosis, the mineral free water sucks minerals and salts out of the tadpole. Here is the single turquoise and bronze that made it - you can see its eyes here.

Finally, some food for the human.

Labels: diy, pet food, pets, photos, poison dart frogs

// posted by Erik @ 7/01/2008 08:58:00 PM
permalink | 0 comments | post comment | email post:

I learned how to do this here, so just a quick walk around the cricket ranch.

Here's the feeding trough. They're eating cat food and powdered milk. As soon as I placed the lid full of food in the ranch, they started carrying off whole nuggets a third their size and greater in weight.

Crickets are pretty stupid and will drown themselves in any available open water so you have to give them something to suck on.

The egg cartons are just for them to crawl around on and hide under.

The small tub of soil is for the lady crickets to lay their eggs in. The broods arising from the small incubator will carry on the colony. As per the baby crickets born of the large incubator ... well, I'm not going to do anything Pol Pot didn't do, but I won't do it as efficiently and on a much smaller scale.

Labels: diy, pet food, pets, poison dart frogs, recipes

// posted by Erik @ 5/28/2008 06:03:00 PM
permalink | 0 comments | post comment | email post:

I'm growing flightless fruit flies to feed my pet plants. About a month ago I bought a culture of them from a pet store for $5.99 - I believe today I bought enough ingredients to make dozens of times more flies for about the same price. First, here is the store purchased culture.

Because millions of people without in-sink disposals unwittingly make fruit fly cultures every day I figure it's rather difficult to fail in the venture. I've read that using vinegar instead of water inhibits mold growth so I threw into the blender a small apple, half a package of potato buds, half a package of baking yeast and wet it down a bit with apple cider vinegar.

I kept the apple peels for springtail food. Or more accurately, food for springtail food. More on that tomorrow.

After blending everything down to a cookie dough consistency, I used a root beer bottle to mash the mush more or less evenly across the bottoms of a mason jar and pickle jar. I put one in the freezer for later.

I learned a new word today, excelsior,

wood shavings (thin curly wood shavings used for packing or stuffing)

In this case, the source of my excelsior - pods of a Northern Catalpa - proved the first positive about having a nearly all year mess of the foot-long woody pods in the yard. Those woody pods are perfect excelsior material for my pet flies to find a purchase.

I shook 30-40 flies from the original culture into their new breeding grounds and locked them in with a paper towel and rubber bands.

Labels: apples, blending, carnivorous plants, diy, pet food, poison dart frogs, recipes, science

// posted by Erik @ 5/15/2008 06:44:00 PM
permalink | 0 comments | post comment | email post: