A couple years ago I went to a temporary traveling exhibit called "Frogs!" at a local museum (
here's someone's blog with some photos). The species they had on display were pretty common, but that's OK (one problem with being in exotics hobbies is that a person gets really hard to impress, species-wise), and the informational placards were minimal but interesting nonetheless.
The thing that made it far, far less than it could have been was that every exhibit was essentially the same design -- all the vivs were basically the same shape and size (this is memory speaking, but roughly 2' x 2' x 4' tall) and the same 'scaping, just "generic tropical rainforest". Not only did the displays not really show how the frogs live in very basic ways such as whether they're arboreal or terrestrial (and of course they did not suit the frogs' needs in ways that would get a lot of criticism here), but missed very valuable opportunities to teach how the animals interact with specific plants (such as
Ranitomeya -- which I don't recall them having -- with
Heliconia, and this could be contrasted with a nearby display of
D. leucomelas in a half scrubby trees half grass exhibit to show how they sometimes live on forest edges). Just so much educational opportunity missed on a crowd that actually went out of their way to learn about frogs. It would have made the exhibit more valuable for the more knowledgeable viewers and not taken anything away from people who just want to see random frogs (since they could ignore the non-frog differences between displays).
I did
this viv based on an actual forest feature used by the species (there's a link in the thread to the study that described the feature). The plants are not locale-appropriate (but then, neither is the substrate or leaf litter species), so this only goes so far. A person could do better with the plants and substrate, for sure, and for a different species of frog there are Peruvian leaf litter species available on the market.
