Tuesday 8 May 2012

More eggs than you can shake a stick at

Its busy busy here at the rural jungle and Kelly and myself have been really pleased with the way things are going nowadays. We currently have 3 wild caught pairs of frogs that have started breeding along side our tio of Dendrobates Leucomelas. Our Cobalts are still going strong and we now have 9 tadpoles and around 30 eggs.
Here are the earliest eggs hatching:


And here are the eggs from their next clutch:

As you can see the tadpoles are starting to take shape.

Our Leucs have produced a really good clutch of 11 eggs:


The tinctorius Ole Marie have produced another great clutch (fingers crossed these will survive).


And more recently our Powder blues surprised us by dropping these little beauties under a coconut hut after only being with us for about a month.


So like I said more eggs than you shake a stick at but I also have a few tadpoles from the Cobalt's as well:



Some of them are developed enough to have back legs:

And others are still tiny and have only just left the comfort of their egg:

I currently keep my eggs in covered Petri dishes until the tadpole emerges naturally, I flood the dishes to provide enough water for the tadpoles for a couple of days. Once they are stronger I put them into disposable plastic cups that have 4 hour pierced in the side. I add a bit of Elodea for some cover/natural food. These cups are kept in my tadpole rearing system. This is a fairly new idea and I'm hoping the increased filtration means less work but cleaner water for the tads.
Here it is:

The water is maintained at 26° and has a filter placed at the far end. The out let for the filter is at the end with the syphon (purely there so easy to find when I need it) so water flows from end to end but is fairly gentle. There is a red bush tea bag in one of the cups at the far end and that keeps just the right amount of tea to colour the water but not pollute it. This red bush tea has natural anti fungal properties and should stop anything funky happening.
This is in its early stages but I'm hoping to see some success very soon and within a few weeks it should be full with tadpoles, the whole system can hold 33 tad's but I have a couple more of these that I can set up when I need to.