AJC's Frogroom: The kaiseri saga

[Frog News]

AJC's Frogroom (UK) November 8th, 2009 04:07 AM: The kaiseri saga

My group of Neurergus kaiseri are still continuing to lay regularly, but I'm having problems raising any offspring. For a start, the adults have turned into ravenous egg and larvae eaters, so unless I'm quick, nothing survives for long. This is quite different from my previous experience with this species, where I was able to raise the offspring to metamorphosis quite easily in the same large, semi-aquatic vivarium as the adults.

I can find some of the eggs, but finding and removing larvae from the large, heavily planted vivarium is next to impossible. Nevertheless, since I figured out the eggs were being eaten, for the last month I've been trying to raise larvae in another vivarium, but without much success. Today, I discovered the reason why. There is a large and thriving colony of Gammarus (scuds) in the vivarium. I don't know what species of Gammarus this is (there are lots), but they are pretty voracious predators on newly hatched larvae.

Consequently, I'm having to resort to trying to raise the larvae in a plastic tub. Normally, I don't have a great deal of success with this method - I tend to do better raising caudate larvae in large, heavily-planted aquaria. However, this is a reasonably large storage box (~15 litres), stuffed full of plants and has been established for a while, so hopefully this will work. I'll let you know.

Full Blog Article: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/frogr...seri-saga.html