Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have a very large (soon to be ) set up. It is about 5 ft tall 5 ft wide and 2 ft deep. I want to set it up fro red eyed tree frogs but the more i look into dart frogs them more i want them. If any body cold give me some help i would appreciate it. thank you. i do have some experience with reptiles, i currently have 7 cubans, 9 bullfrogs, one albino pacman, ,bearded dragon, water dragon and one slobbering farting bulldog.

That is pretty big for some dart frogs, and considering when you first get darts they will probably be very small juveniles. Feeding your frogs in that large of an enclosure might be a problem too, frogs finding the food before the insects crawl away.
You might want to put a few dividers in and that way you could have different varieties also. I never recommend mixing, the less stress the animals have to deal with the better.

You will want to put your new froglets or juveniles into a small nursery or quarantine tank anyway before you introduce them to the large vivarium. (I use small 2 gallon fish tanks with hinged glass lids, just wet paper towels for a substrate along with some plant cuttings and a couple of hide spots for a "nursery." Critter keepers with the vents sealed or even plastic "shoe boxes" are sometimes used as quaratine/nursery tanks. Let them grow a bit, make sure they are eating and healthy, or they may indeed get lost to your ability to monitor them in such a nice large tank. Older darts do learn quickly where the food source is concentrated, but the froglets and juveniles may not be able to find it as readily. I wouldn't mix any of the species together, at least until you get some experience. After six years, I haven't done this yet. With such a nice large tank, divisions as Dan suggests might work pretty well. Depending upon what you get, some darts are extremely territorial, so read up on the care sheets before you choose.

In any event, you have a lot of fun to look forward to.
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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
2 D. azureus
4 P vittatus

I have had success with these large display vivs by heavily seeding the tank ahead of time. Using springtails, flour beetles, ants and other nematodes you can create a heavily laden food supply for the little ones while they learn the ropes of the tank. I have a 400 gal with 3 Panamanian auratus and 1 bicolor and they do great with little food supplementation. Flies every three days and some pinheads every couple of weeks. In fact the insects do so well the frogs tend to ignore the flies I put in. I'm debating low cal diet for their fat bellies

Cory

There should be no problem with different varieties in an enclosure that size. As others mentioned, maintaining fruitfly cultures successfully enough to high high food densities will be the biggest problems. I second the opinion that if you get froglets you should keep them in a small tank or partition until they get big.

I kept azureus, Phyllobates auroranea, and Phyllomedusa tomopturna in a 60x24x24 inch heavily planted tank. All did well, and the aurotanea even bred and babies came to maturity with no feeding or intervention by me at all.

You don't want to allow related species or morphs to breed as mucking up the natural varieties with hybrids would suck.