Reptile & Amphibian Forums

OK I flushed one of my nepenthes pots and dumped the water into a plastic cup with crushed mushrooms and cow dirt. There seemed to be plenty of little moving things but these seem larger than the micro sized springtails in the rest of my pots. Actually these look to get about 3mm in size compared to the 1mm I am use to seeing. Anyway, can they live on mushrooms and cow dirt or am I supposed to feed the little suckers something else?

If you really think I'm doing this the hard way or have the wrong bugs feel free to post a link to some springtail starter cultures.

thanks
joseph

Well, I'm not sure what those larger bugs are, but I got a great starter culture from lfs cultures:
www.lfscultures.com
If I were you, I'd stick with buying a pure culture so as to avoid inadvertently introducing any pests that might hurt your plants (or your frogs!).
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Randy
Lawrence, Kansas
1.1 Azureus
1.1 Cobalt
1.1 Fantasticus
1.1 Bastimentos Pumilio

Feed them cow dirt and mushrooms and use them. With that diet, you won't even have to dust them with vitamins before feeding them to your frogs. They are probably the "real" springtails I can remember finding under logs and later, actually "springing" around in my green house, and not those I culture now, that merely squirm in anemic lethargy in a puddle of charcoal and yeast. If they don't turn out to be a species of springtail, so what? If your frogs go after them, they are still good food for the frogs. I wish I had some of your springtails. I'd have to wean them from cow dirt to horse poop because I have a paucity of the former and an over-abundance of the latter.

Maybe you should cultivate and sell them along with bags of cow dirt and mushrooms. I'd buy.
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Patty
Lost River, Idaho

For some reason I just enjoy most of your posting, must be your cynical side I appreciate.

Well they look exactly like springtails except larger and seem to take on an almost grayish appearance at full size which is darn near the size of the small fruit flies. I assume the springtails you culture are the small white specs I see in all my other pots? they just don't seem large enough to me.

Also I've heard aphids can be cultured and aquired from Bershire Biology, anyone have a link?

This may seem like a lot of effort, but sweepings aren't possible in my neck of the concrete.

joe

I don't mean to be cynical, just practical. The new bugs, whatever they are, are not going to harm your frogs any more than sweeping for field plankton, which I do all the time for my frogs. I was also serious about their diet of cow dirt and mushrooms, even when I joked a little about substituting horse poop. It's a lot more nutritious than a diet of pastry with yeast, which is essentially what we feed our fruit flies and springtails.

The frogs are not going to catch any exotic diseases from eating these insects. The springtails you have found in your Nepenthes have apparently done no harm to them, so they aren't going to invade your terrarium, either. They would get eaten up by your frogs before they had a chance, anyway.

I may have said before, I use aphids as a kind of dessert for my frogs. I merely pluck them from leaves in my "organic" garden when I find them and serve them on the leaf. I don't worry about the aphids invading the vivarium, because aphids are relatively plant specific. Any potential adaptors get eaten up before they can adapt to the tropical plants. They are agricultural pests, so there are no places to buy them and oddly, you probably couldn't cultivate them deliberately in a contained environment. Some depend upon the ants that milk them for sugars, or even use some that produce ethanol as rum bottles. Ants may herd and carry them around to leaf pastures to graze like cows, and other aphids have a complex life cycles that include a winged stage. They would be close to impossible to cultivate deliberately.

One way to attract some is to put out a couple of pots of geraniums or other potted plants on your balcony or porch or in the middle of your cement. That would be a kind of first in the annals of horticulture- getting a plant only to attract an aphid invasion, but it would work. Just don't tell anyone the real reason, or you will be either arrested or put away. The "majority" is narrow minded and extemely stupid.
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Patty
Lost River, Idaho

The springtails I got from lfs are really rather large, very active, and produce like crazy! I feed them cheap goldfish flake food and that's it...no poop needed.
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Randy
Lawrence, Kansas
1.1 Azureus
1.1 Cobalt
1.1 Fantasticus
1.1 Bastimentos Pumilio

There are several differnt species of springtails, so you can find them in several different sizes (and, as I understand, in different colors as well). I don't know anything about feeding them compost (although it must work, as I see them in my compost pile all the time), but I have found that they are extremely easy to culture and feed off if you keep them in little margarine tubs or shoe boxes filled with a rather course medium such as coco husk chips or orchid bark mixed with activated charcoal (yes, I know, I use this stuff for EVERYTHING).

I feed mine some "high color flake food" just because I had plenty left over from my days of raising tropical fish. I have some friends who recommend using cous cous (a type of grain--I think--that is somewhat like rice) that I will try when the fish food runs out.

To feed the springtails to my frogs, I simply flood the medium, they float to the top, and I pour them off into the terrarium. Of course, they jump everywhere when being poured, so make sure you have the container well placed over the terrarium (another benefit of having a front opening terrarium).

My frogs LOVE springtails, and I understand that they are a high protein source for the frogs. I probably feed springtails to my frogs every other day, in addition to the dusted fruit flies. Once you get a culture of springtails going (which may take a couple of weeks), I'd start making some other cultures so that you have plenty . . . they're a great backup food source.

Good luck,

Homer
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Homer W. Faucett III, esq.
Purveyor of Trivialities and Fine Nonsense