Fear of Clowns

Flightless fruit flies are the staple food for most captive dart frogs; I've so far been more successfull with other feeder insects. My cricket ranch is producing hundreds of pinhead crickets.

This is the bedding I removed from the main colony - it's now in a 6 quart Seralite container with some dry catfood, powdered milk and damp sphagnum moss. What else could a baby cricket need?

By the way, I'm watching Dave Letterman interview a very drunk Jack Black at the moment.

I'm not exactly sure what these are - I've read them referred to as bean beetles and bean weevils. They're amazingly easy to culture - all they need is dry black-eyed-peas. No water, no anything else. There were 8 or a dozen individuals in my starter culture - all dead for weeks now. Three days ago, a single beetle emerged, yesterday two dozen, today swarms. I split the "used" beans into two new cultures and added fresh beans to the original culture.

They must emerge from the beans sexually mature as all they do is crawl around and mate with each other.

Here I have a mixture of vermiculite, small pebbles and LECA. On top I've layered damp corrugated cardboard. This is a culture of isopods - similar to pill bugs, rolly-pollies and woodlice - the things that roll up or scatter when you lift up something that hasn't been lifted up in a while. They are all isopods.

This page and video was really helpful to me. Not sure what to try for food, I'm giving them a smorgasbord: watermelon rind, banana peel, yeast, oatmeal and a tortilla.

Covered with a final layer of cardboard as these are the things you see when lifting up something that hasn't been lifted up in a while.

Springtails - another animal you'll only see when looking under things. I'm using charcoal as a medium as their buoyancy allows one to harvest them by flooding the container and scooping a mass of them off the top of the water.

Food for the springtails: yeast and oatmeal.

For my tadpoles, bloodworms. Purchased frozen from a pet store.

I moved my tads to larger containers.

I killed two of my three turquoise and bronze and auratus tadpoles by using straight reverse osmosis water. By osmosis, the mineral free water sucks minerals and salts out of the tadpole. Here is the single turquoise and bronze that made it - you can see its eyes here.

Finally, some food for the human.

Labels: diy, pet food, pets, photos, poison dart frogs

// posted by Erik @ 7/01/2008 08:58:00 PM
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