I think your own suggestion seems the best plan, then just watch those you think are two females for over-aggression. It might not happen in a tank with lots of cover and a generous "foot-print."

I still have a lot of trouble sexing by toe pads and body habitus with the tinc group--Mine are azureus. Even with my proven breeding pair, I sometimes confuse them, and find the toe differences between them to be rather subtle. Other people with more general tinc experience seem to be much more confident, but sometimes when pictures are posted of several frogs with spread out toes, (put up for a sexing vote) there will be some disagreements, so at least I'm not entirely alone with this. Maybe you will luck out and actually have another male in the separated pair.

I raised 4 groups of tadpoles from eggs last summer between June and August--all from my mated pair. As the froglets morphed out, I put them in arbitrary pairs of the same age in 10 gallon nursery tanks. In one tank, the two froglets began to seriously fight after only two months, at the juvenile stage, so I separated one of them into a tank I built and gave to a friend. I told her I thought it was probably a female from the aggression I'd observed, but couldn't be sure. In another instance, I put a lone survivor of an egg batch directly into a 20 gallon hex tank. He quickly developed obvious male characteristics, with very large, distinctive toe pads that even I couldn't miss, and he is now only 6 months old, but as large and more male appearing, body and toe-pad-wise, than his father. So perhaps there are individual differences, (or he found a secret source of steroids.)

Sometimes I think the longer I keep dart frogs, the less I actually know about them. They don't always follow the rules.
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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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