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What ways does everyone here use to mist their vivs? Does anyone have a misting machine or do you always use a sprayer? I was just looking at misting systems tonight and thought I would gather some opinions.

I hand mist most of my tanks. I have a homemade misting system that I put together for my ventrimaculatis tank. If you have a tight fitting top and a water feature, you probably won't need to mist more than every few days.
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Purveyor of Trivialities and Fine Nonsense

I hand mist, too. As Homer says, with a water feature, it doesn't have to be a daily chore. I just make sure the bromeliad cups have water in them and pay special attention to the nursery tanks and anything that doesn't have a built in water feature. Some of my frogs will jump right under the misting spray, while others seem to resent it. Use spring water or artesian well water, not distilled for misting, by the way. I inadvertently killed a newly emerging froglet by filling his brome cup with distilled water and depriving him of electrolytes. (Frog skin is more subject to osmosis than keritinized skin, although there is a limited active "pump" system. You can overwhelm this by using distilled water for any length of time.) What do you use, Homer?

Most commercial misting systems I've looked into are for multiple tanks (or greenhouses.) While I have multiple tanks, they are scattered around the house and up three stories, so I've never considered attempting to connect these all together with an automated system.
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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

4 D. auratus blue
5 D. galactonotus pumpkin orange splash back
5 D. imitator
6 D. leucomelas
4 D. pumilio Bastimentos
4 D. fantasticus
4 P. terribilis
4 D. reticulatus
4 D. castaneoticus

Patty,

I have heard others indicate their feeling that RO or distilled water can deprive tads and frogs of nutrients. However, I have used RO water from my household RO unit without any problems for both tads and spraying. I can also say that the froggers I know locally all use distilled water for their setups without any apparent problems.

I certainly like the fact that using RO water eliminates hard water deposits on the glass.
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Purveyor of Trivialities and Fine Nonsense

Homer-- I love to argue with you, and you are usually right, but I didn't say that distilled water deprived frogs of "nutrients;" I said it robbed them of electrolytes by osmosis and the balance necessary for cell function because the frog skin is more like a permeable membrane than a mammal skin. While the cell membranes of frog skin have a limited capacity for actively pumping electrolytes in and out, they can be overwhelmed from an osmotic imbalance of electrolytes--sodium, cloride, potassium, etc. by constant exposure to distilled water that doesn't contain these.

In the hospital, when one rehydrates a human person with an IV, it is usually with a normal saline solution, Ringers, or some sort of glucose, depending upon the problem. If you would put in an IV drip of distilled water, the first thing that would happen is all of the red blood cell membranes that came into contact with it would burst open, with other cells to follow. An IV is never straight water. A non-electrolyte solution simply destroys permeable cell membranes by osmosis. A large injection of distilled water would make a lovely murder weapon. I may be wrong in relating this to the distilled water we may provide for our frogs, which is somewhat ammended by the "nutrients" from soil, or anything else it may contact, but I still maintain the arguement that it isn't the best thing to do.

I admit that distilled water doesn't leave any residue on the tank surface.
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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

4 D. auratus blue
5 D. galactonotus pumpkin orange splash back
5 D. imitator
6 D. leucomelas
4 D. pumilio Bastimentos
4 D. fantasticus
4 P. terribilis
4 D. reticulatus
4 D. castaneoticus

Wow, Patty is pulling off the gloves. I should have been more specific with my wording, but I don't want you to think that I was quoting you regarding the nutrient/electrolyte withdrawl.

I will agree that if you have a permeable membrane and an osmotic gradient, electrolytes will flow from the hypertonic solution (water with solutes dissolved) to the hypotonic solution (pure water). However, I am not convinced that this is necessarily the case with regard to misting darts. Here is why:

(1) Frog membranes are semipermeable, not purely permeable, and, as you note, they do have a primitive pump system working against any solutes (electrolytes)leaving the membrane.

(2) Merely misting a tank is unlikely to be able to produce that osmotic gradient on a frog's skin for a long enough period of time to actually remove electrolytes. Movement along an osmotic gradient does take some time, even with a purely permeable membrane. Further, unless you are misting heavily to where water is running off of a frog's back, the water that does form on the frog's back is likely to evaporate, leaving the electrolyte once again on the frog's back in a form that is more concentrated than it is in the frog (i.e., osmosis in the other direction will occur, causing re-uptake of a good portion of that electrolyte).

(3) Distilled water should have no different dissolved solid content than rainwater, which dart frogs are exposed to in the wild. Rain is nothing more than evaporated water that recondenses into droplets and falls to the ground. Distilled water is water that is evaporated from a tank and recondensed into another reservoir. The only difference I can see is if the distillery uses copper piping for the condensation tubing or boiling pot. That might not be so healthy for your frogs, but I don't really know what the more common boilers or condensation tubing is composed of in the industry today. Plus, remember that even distilled water will contain some dissolved solids that were ionized when the water boiled.

I agree completely that adding water directly to the bloodstream will cause RBC's to burst, and cause massive tissue damage, but we aren't talking about adding water to the bloodstream. We are talking about adding distilled water in mist form to an enclosure that houses animals from a rainforest.

I personally use RO water because my well water is run through a water softener and I don't want to add salt to my tanks (not to mention that water straight from the well has such a high calcium/iron content it is ridiculous). Thus far, I have had no bad results from using the RO water for both misting, water reservoirs, and tad rearing. Although, I will admit that I haven't had my pH or hardness tested lately.
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Purveyor of Trivialities and Fine Nonsense

Homer, I love to fight with you, and one day, I may win one, but this may not be my time. Rain water picks up solutes on the way down. It is not the same as distillled water. However, you are right, misting isn't the same as soaking or using distilled water for a water way or injecting into a vein. (I should never get on the forum during my happy hour when I get carried away with ridiculous comparisons.) Where I got into trouble with distilled water was with using it to both mist and rinse out bromeliad cups in which I had some emerging imitators just morphing from tads. I had run out of spring water and used distilled instead. Within two days, all the froglets that were barely coming out were dead and bloated, as if they'd absorbed too much water. Their brome cup water had been essentially replaced with distilled water, not simply misted. The parent frogs in the same tank weren't affected. They recieved only mist, not a full blown soak.

I'm still going to stick to my guns here, that distilled water is not the best thing for frogs vs water that contains electrolytes.
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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

4 D. auratus blue
5 D. galactonotus pumpkin orange splash back
5 D. imitator
6 D. leucomelas
4 D. pumilio Bastimentos
4 D. fantasticus
4 P. terribilis
4 D. reticulatus
4 D. castaneoticus

Ahhh, you were replacing spring water in brom cups with distilled water . . . now that is a different story! I think I know what happenned now.

It is pretty well documented (I believe it was Scheele in Rivulins of the Old World) that introducing fish from a water supply that is high in dissolved solids immediately into a water supply that is low in dissolved solids will cause the gills of the fish to burst, asphyxiating the fish. However, going from low dissolved solids to high will not cause the same problem (mostly for the reasons you have noted). Further, if in the first circumstance (high to low) you slowly replace the water high in dissolved solids with water low in dissolved solids (rather than the quick introduction from high to low), the fish adapt to the osmotic difference and have no problems.

I think what happened in your situation is very similar to the fish going from high dissolved solids to an almost complete water change where the water has almost no dissolved solids. The rapid change in the osmotic pressure was not able to be adapted to by the froglets, causing them to swell with water (osmotic gradient causing water to be drawn to the hypertonic solution). The poor little guys probably had massive tissue damage from the swelling much like the fish gills bursting.

Therefore, I don't think it was so much a robbing of electrolytes as an uncontrolled swelling due to rapid change in osmotic pressure that was the doom of the froglet. That would explain why most of the people I know (who all use distilled water) don't have problems with using distilled . . . the tads and froglets were raised in the low dissolved solids environment and were never subjected to the rapid change that was probably the real culprit.
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Purveyor of Trivialities and Fine Nonsense

Thanks Homer. I aways get something out of an argument with you! I hope poor Dragon did too. We sort of took over the entire thread here. I hope we didn't lose him.
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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

4 D. auratus blue
5 D. galactonotus pumpkin orange splash back
5 D. imitator
6 D. leucomelas
4 D. pumilio Bastimentos
4 D. fantasticus
4 P. terribilis
4 D. reticulatus
4 D. castaneoticus

I am using a 180 dollar system from Pro Products, it is called Promist and comes with a digital timer to program my cycles. I currently have 1 cycle of 2 minutes a day to keep everything moist and I could not be happier with it!
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Me fail english? That's unpossible

I'm still walking on my knuckles with automated misting systems. I'll look it up, unless you can give us a more direct contact to your source.
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Patty
Pahsimeroi, Idaho

4 D. auratus blue
5 D. galactonotus pumpkin orange splash back
5 D. imitator
6 D. leucomelas
4 D. pumilio Bastimentos
4 D. fantasticus
4 P. terribilis
4 D. reticulatus
4 D. castaneoticus

Here is the link for the system I use.
Pro Mist Systems

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Me fail english? That's unpossible