Wild caught food

[shawn13]

I live in Ohio, and have a myriad of black crickets in the yard. How safe, for the P.D.F.'s, would it be if I were to catch these crickets then breed them? Feeding the following generation to the frogs. Would I still have to be concerned about parasites, deseases, etc.?

[qwertkb2d]

I have done this before, but not with PDFs.

In general I'd say no if the crickets are adults. Black crickets, though smaller in size, have a harder exoskeleton then the typical house cricket sold at the pet store. This may prove troublesome to the digestion tract of the PDFs.

Also, you don't know what the black crickets have eaten. Many toxins in our environment can be taken up by plants and not properly metabolized. Look up phytoremediation for more information on plants capabilities to take in toxins. The difficulty here is that these toxins in the plants can be stored for years (assuming you have no winter).

Anyhow...the crickets would be eating this and then feeding this to the frog could prove deadly over time.

All in all...it is a gamble...one that I wouldn't risk. You'd be better off taking a net and sweeping the grass for smaller prey items till you can gain a better source for quality foods.

[shawn13]

Now that you mention it, I had been wondering if the crickets may be too hard externally.
Pretty safe to catch and use for food things like springtails, aphids, etc.. If I were to breed them, springtails, aphids,etc., how wholesome would these critters be to the frogs?

[qwertkb2d]

The great thing about breeding your own food is that you can help increase their nutritional value:

Springtails:

can be cultured easily bu taking a plastic container and putting some charcoal chunks in the bottom and top it with peat. The charcoal will keep the odor down. Add about a centimeter of water in the bottom and then add the springtails.

Food: You can feed them multiple things: potatoes/carrots/fruit, but these tend to form more mold. Some people use commercial stuff for them. I use a giant can of fish flakes. I crush the flakes and put em on top the peat....I've never had a problem with mold (crossing my fingers).

Aphids: Very difficult to culture as they can take over a plant in a matter of weeks. I also do not recommend this food source as they hardly move and frogs need some serious movement to get their twitch on. You could grab these from pesticide free plants, but they are more work then they are worth. Other opinions might differ.

Overall: Although springtails are a good food source...they easily hide in the substrate once introduced. The best food you could culture would be fruitflies. There are many medias out there that are less odorous then they used to be, and three cultures in rotation could feed a few small frogs continuously. Plus you can actually dust fruitflies with the necessary nutrients frogs don't get in typical captive food sources.

Springtails are a great food source, but I wouldn't count on them as a primary source for a larger frog.

If you want I can describe how you can culture your own pinheads (though its quite a bit of work).

[KeroKero]

I don't know how much the harder exoskeleton would really effect the PDFs... they do enjoy their ants, beetles, and mites... most of which I'd say are harder then those crickets. Toxins wouldn't be as much of an issue in the raised young, more in the collected animals, but you have to worry about parasites being carried onto the young via the substrate the eggs are laid in. Then again, they could easily have less parasites than store bought crickets. Feeding a live organism to another live organism will always carry risks. That's why we have so many talks about vets and fecals...

I've bred these for my frogs in the past... handy for phyllobates and those that like larger crickets, but due to their hatch out size being significantly larger than house crickets, they miss the window of preference for many of the more common frogs in the hobby. I've not found them to be any more attractive to frogs than the house crickets, which means that most of the tinc group would like them anyways even if they hatched out smaller :roll: My personal vote? Probably not worth the effort.

There are plenty of bugs already in the hobby to try for variations (click here for an incomplete list of inverts typically cultured as small feeder items).

qwertkb2d - there are two excellent (and easily available) articles on raising aphids in mass online... one from the Frognet Mailing List, and another I was recently pointed to. The culture is a little more intensive than most PDF keepers are used to (can't just stick them in a cup of media - need to grow out fava bean plants and plan ahead a bit more), but still pretty easy. Once disturbed (like smacking them off the plant) they move around enough that frogs pick them off like candy. Baby aphids were actually how I managed to raise my first pumilio, before I kept springtails. My frogs learned rather quickly that me smacking a stem of a plant over their tank meant aphids for lunch! On leaf litter they stand out like a sore thumb and didn't last long

[shawn13]

Thank you both, it helped me decide not to do the wild caught thing. Although, I will probably catch the sprintails.
My crickets have been multiplying expeditiously. I heard that cooling their environment down will lengthen the lifespan, slow down the growth rate, and the only adverse side effect is: breeding likewise is slowed. Would this method be idea to maintain pinhead crickets for a prolonged period of time?
Thanks for the help,
Shawn

[Ed]

Depending on what you are feeding some frogs will take the crickets up to 10-12 days post hatch.
I don't deal with too much in the way of pinheads at work but instead use 10 day olds for a variety of the larger dendrobatids and Atelopus.

Ed