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WHY BREED YOUR OWN FEEDER INSECTS?
It would be ideal if we could supply our animals with freshly caught feeder insects all year round,
but this is not always possible.
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We
may not have the time to, each day to spend collecting insects.
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| Some of the colder countries will have
shortages during their winter periods.
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| Culturing your own feeder insects is the
easiest and cheapest way of ensuring that you have both a reliable and
constant food supplies.
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| Remember a person can never have too
much food!
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| Often if you bought your feeder insects
at a pet store, they may have a low nutritious value due to not having
been fed a nutritious diet.
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| The cost of buying all or most of your
feeder insects is unacceptably high for most of us.
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| The advantages to breeding feeder
insects are that: it's cheaper, the yield is higher
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| You can gut load your feeder insects to
make it a more nutritionally sound food source. |
Food cultures can occasionally crash but this happens to beginners and experienced frog keepers and at times such as this good to do some trading with fellow frog and reptile keepers, having extra food will make you VERY popular with friends when they have food problems.
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NB. Have a reliable and consistent food source BEFORE to obtaining your animals, otherwise they will suffer or die needlessly!
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FEEDING DENDROBATID FROGS
| In their natural habitat Dendrobatid frogs have a large selection of insects to feed on, this can include flies, small beetles, grubs and almost any thing that moves, ants seem to make up a high % of their natural diet, but seem not to be taken as readily in captivity. As most frog keepers have yet to find a method of easily cultivating these feeder insects (ants) without the use of excessively large set ups, ants are not very often found to be a common feeder insect. |
| In the wild the feeder insects that frogs and other herps eat may be due to the way these insect move, look and smell e.g. colour and shape. This coupled with the abundance of certain insect types,
This would be the most likely reason why certain feeder insects make up the staple diet of wild animals and other insects do not, even though the staple feeder insect is not the most nutritionally advantages to eat. |
E.G. In the tropics as in most of the sub-tropical to temperate regions of the world, ants can be found in abundance on the ground as well as higher up in trees, ants are also constantly moving hence they are an easy feeder insect for
PDF’s.
| This might explain why some animals will sometimes choose one type of feeder insect over another even when the insect of choice may be larger in size than others in the batch that we have just given them! |
E.G. Fruits flies have a tendency to remain motionless at times, crickets are spiky insects and are not found in large numbers in the wild, woodlouse
move more like ants and are smoother in appearance, thus probably triggering some hard wired instinct in the frogs to the point that they may even actively pursue the prey!
| One of the critical points to take into consideration when keeping dart frogs is that, it is important to feed them appropriate food. Remember that even with the small size of these frogs, most species will only eat the smaller feeder insects, but this is also not a hard and fast rule. |
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