It can be done, and has been done with caution. Personally, I have no first hand experience with mixing species, although I intended to mix some Ancon Hill auratus with yellow galactonotus in a 180 gallon tank, until I discovered how shy the Ancon Hill were and chose to keep them in a smaller tank I could find and monitor them more readily in. If they are already intimidated and shy, I'm afraid they may not thrive with a bunch of big, bold, cleaver and piggy galactonotus.

This is one of the most worked over topics there is in all of the forums. The consensus, such as it is, is that you should never mix species from different parts of the world. They should all have the same requirements and same original natural habitats. The tank needs to be set up to give each its separate territory. And pull eggs--don't allow different species or color morph populations of the same species to breed. One of the unwritten dogmas of keeping dart frogs is not to create hybrids or allow "designer frogs" into the hobby. The general goal is to keep the various populations as much like the original ones as possible. (Not that captive bred darts aren't also evolving from the originals, as well.)

That said, I think that anyone who wants to consider this should have some experience with each individual type of frog one intends to mix first, before mixing them together. Or if you are considering different families of rain forest amphibians such as anoles, or any of the south American reptiles, the same caution applies. Zoos and many European hobbyists in particular, who have very large, complex vivariums, do some apparently successful mixing for show and tell.

I have found that although my first ambition, like almost every beginner, was to have a show tank with lots of colors, the more frogs I got into and kept, the less I wanted to mix them with anything else, as I realized the space they use and how they interact, and how beautiful they are on their own. Some are difficult enough to keep all by themselves, and others are so much fun to watch with their own interactions, that I gradually lost the desire to mix them-- just kept building more tanks instead.

Mixing would involve the ability to separate any of the inhabitants immediately back into its own habitat with any signs of stress or problems.

We recently had a post here that directed us to a Reptile magazine article where dozens of different rain forest species, including some snakes, other reptiles, amphibians and several dart frog species were mixed together in a very large habitat-- I had a verbal fit, and so did another of the posters here. The people who did this were apparently quite qualified in all aspects, despite our rantings to the contrary. We were ignorant of their expertise at the time. They are qualified biologists, know a lot about each of the animals they mixed together, and provided well thought out habitats for each. However, I found out later, that this article was published 7 years after it was submitted, and wasn't a recent endeavor. They had built and stocked this habitat 7 years ago. I have found nothing since that followed up about how this experiment turned out. I would like to find out if it is still such a "brag patch" 7 years later, and what problems ensued in the meantime, what they did about it, etc. I think it was something like a 750 gallon or comparable enclosure.




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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

Dendrobates: auratus blue, auratus Ancon Hill, tinctorius azureus, leucomelas. Phyllobates: vittatus, terribilis, lugubris. Epipedobates: anthonyi tricolor pasaje. Ranitomeya fantastica, imitator, reticulata. Adelphobates castaneoticus, galactonotus. Oophagia pumilio Bastimentos. (updated systematic nomenclature)

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