I was reading through a couple of old threads, and it occurred to me that there are a ton of useful posts that we will probably never see. If you remember seeing a particularly useful, or even just really interesting post from a few years ago... throw it up here.
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Originally Posted by markbudde
I would love to go to NAAC and meet everyone, but my schedule doesn't allow it this year. Let me start by saying that I am just looking for interesting discussion, not trying to say anyone is right or wrong. Based on my reading, but not direct observation, I would say that we may be able to significantly improve the diets of our critters, and we can do this by supplementing the culture media and offering a nutritionally balanced food supply. Specifically, I think offering things like bean beetles, isopods and the correct springtails plus UV light may get us much further than fruit flies.
In regards to the 12 hour vitamin retention time... very cool. I guess they must get some into their joints and under their wings (or maybe they eat it as part of grooming). In regards to gut loading and nutrient modification, here is some published data(fair use).
From Oecologia 127:207-213 ...
Flies were grown on Fly medium plus supplements and then fed to wolf spiders. The supplements were: fat, amino acids, vitamins, methionine or dogfood (E-flies). The spiders were weighed weekly. The flies fed dogfood resulted in spiders more than double the size of control flies. This shows that fly food can affect fly nutritional quality.
Next, they fed the spiders either flies or E-flies, which had been either fed or starved for 48 hours. If the effect was merely gut loading, as might be suggested, then the starved flies should be of worse nutritional quality. What they saw was that starved flies were just as nutritious as fed flies, suggesting that the nutritional quality of the flies had been altered, not just their gut contents.
I'd also like to bring up another study on prey nutrition and a balanced diet. This is from Oecologia 119:191-197, and I think it is a really cool study. They fed the spiders either springtails, flies, aphids, spiders, fungus gnats or a mix thereof. Spiders grew very well on the springtail, Tomocerus bidentatus, which is a large ground dwelling species. They grew OK on drosophila and poorly (hardly at all) on spiders, aphids or fungus gnats. Two species of springtail, Folsomia candida and Isotoma trispinata were worse than starvation, even when mixed in with other food items. The best diet consisted of T. bidentatus and Drosophila mixed together.
This data also makes clear that some varieties of springtail are much better than others. I alluded to this in another post. I am currently culturing another species of springtail which I beleive to be Orchesella villosa, in the same subfamily as H. nitidus, which has also been shown to be a good food. I tried to culture some Tomocerus, but couldn't get them to lay eggs.
If I ever start getting a significant number of offspring from my frogs, I am going to do a controlled study of the effects of food source on frog growth/health. Sorry about the rambling, but this is hopefully an interesting read for those of you who are bored. :wink:
To put the Folsomia comments into perspective, Ed quoted later that the negative effects were most likely due to the toxin that Folsomia release, which will affect small invertebrates but loses effectiveness with size and will not affect our frogs in the same way.
I also found the quoted statements regarding Tomocerus to be particularly interesting.
This is an informative and very funny post. I love this post, because it had me crying at work. I can actually see this happening. Enjoy people....
Quote:
Originally Posted by ian
Great Stuff is in a highly compressed container. If you screw on the top and it doesn't come out do not punture the seal with a screwdriver! You will just have made a GS rocket and a huge ____ing mess.
When messing with GS, go outside away from the house, wear old clothes and gloves.
Sorry for digging up the past, but I'm new so I'm alowed to do this a few times!!
I use this stuff all the time at work and besides the few new pairs of painting pants that I have made over the years, I'v never have any real disasters.
Sorry but the more I think back to this day, the more I laugh!
So one day a few years back, the boss man gave Me a new helper who wouldn't know how to fall down if He tripped! Sence I wasen't in the mood to teach anything or fix redo any work, I figured I would just give him the case of Great Stuff, show him how to fill in a hole in a wall, and send him on his way.
About an hour later I got to check on him, when I walk up to ask who things were going I see Him trying to clean out the tip with a 12 penny nail.(I think You can see where this is going) Before I get the chance to say anything the can blows up in his face and and flings small peices of the metal to every where!
So now He has sticky foam from the top of His head all the way down to the crotch of His paints, and the first thing He does is take both hands and wipe from his forehead to His bearded chin.(It's so hard to type while laughing this much)
Sence Were a construction sub contractor We just so happen to have what called a MSDS (materal safty data shet) and under "what to do when exposed to skin" it said "Seek medical attention before it dries if possable".
To make it even better, when He asked if there was any thing to keep it from drying, someone said "if You run backword, it dosen't dry as fast"(I kid You not)
So as I get in the truck to chace down as We all now call him (foam face) who is at this point running backwords down the main road, I'm on the phone with fire rescue to find the nearest ER and getting a room set up for him!
By the end of all of this He had to have 3 stitched from where the top of the can went into his arm, 5 or 6 skin grafts covering most of his face and neck, plactic surgery to fix His eye lids, and 3 weeks off for all of his hair and eye lashes to grow back! And to this day if You ask Him what the worst part of this whole story is, He'll tell You that He just paid 60 dollars for the new pair of paints that He was wearing, and His new Lugg boots are now trash!!
There some good to come out of this story!! Great Stuff now sells a solvent to remove their product from things like glass and tile that works pretty good on leather boots and Your hands. But You didn't hear that from Me. Read the label first, there are so nasty chemicals in there! But I know You can get this stuff at many large contractors supply houses like Granger if You get an ugly stain on Your glass tanks that a razor blade can't get!!
Sorry it was so long! I hope it made You guys laugh as much as I did that day!! And I promise from now on to keep it short and dated!
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Since nobody's really posting anything I thought I'd expand it to include good thread reads, especially because we can't sticky every thread out there loaded with good information.
Sometimes I find interesting old stuff by looking at what the web crawlers are crawling on. You can find that by clicking on 'current active users' just above the names of the people online. The guests and web crawlers are at the end of the list.
If you read any of the mixing threads, the reasons are all discussed there. Here are a few to get you started:
-aggression/stress: this is something that can be pretty hard for new froggers to see, it can be VERY subtle, and sometimes doesn't even involve direct action by the offending frog(s).
-exposure to novel pathogens: certain 'bugs' that may not affect frog A from Costa Rica can affect frog B from Brazil (remember what happened when the English settlers reached America and started swapping diseases/viruses with the natives? Same concept, different organism.)
-competition for food/breeding sites etc. - e.g. : I don't own a single thumbnail that I think has the balls to eat within 6 inches of a tinc or terribilis (sirensis aka lamasi/imitators/variabilis/amazonicus)... if someone has witnessed it, I'd love to see a video. in fact, I've seen thumbnails shy away from tincs first hand in a mixed enclosure. they wouldn't get anywhere near the bigger frogs. this can be partly solved with the addition of extra feeding/breeding sites, but is yet another issue that newbies would have to contend with... especially as they haven't yet learned the specific personalities/behaviors of given species of frogs. Another aspect of feeding that would be much harder to control: keeping thumbnails with tincs is going to limit the thumbnails' access to microfauna in the leaf litter, when they would normally have free reign to hunt in a species-specific enclosure.
-more species can hybridize than most new hobbyists realize: for example, most dendrobates can/will hybridize with each other, most pumilio with each other, and most ranitomeya with each other. This limits the types of frogs that could be kept together without hybridization, and makes #1 and #3 more probable.
-given an open area of space, these species would choose to be considerably farther away from each other than we would keep them in 99% of enclosures. shouldn't that be reason enough?
There are frogs (Bastimentos pumilio, Chazuta imitators, etc) that are variable enough to have different colors within the same morph anyways- why mess with all the above issues without prior experience when it's simple enough to have different colors with just one morph of one specie?
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Posts From the Past
Let me start by saying that I am just looking for interesting discussion, not trying to say anyone is right or wrong. Based on my reading, but not direct observation, I would say that we may be able to significantly improve the diets of our critters, and we can do this by supplementing the culture media and offering a nutritionally balanced food supply. Specifically, I think offering things like bean beetles, isopods and the correct springtails plus UV light may get us much further than fruit flies.
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