Feeding Cobalt Tincs

[lilblack94gt]

Right now, my Cobalts are eating fruit flies and they are quite happy and fat with them. I have tried offering pin head crickets to them. But they weren't interested. I'm not sure if that was due to me putting them in a small container to try feeding a few pinheads.

How do you folks introduce new food to your darts? I have been thinking about adding some flour / rice beetles to their diet. But do you actually feed the beetles or do you just feed the larva?

If you do just feed fruit flies, how do you get calcium and vitamins into the darts? Is the stuff that the flies breed in enriched in anyway?

[deranged chipmunk]

my mantellas (old world darts) are fed fruit flies. i dust the fruit flies several times/week, just as i would dust crickets for tree frogs. i haven't fed the rice beetles, but my understanding is that they would eat the larvae.

[poison]

My darts and mantellas just went for the pinheads right away. Putting them in a separate container will just stress them out. Put your flies in a container and dust them then throw them in the enclosure.

[Happy Frog]

My Leucs and D. azureus will eat them but they don't respond to them like they do with the fruit flies. It's probably because the pinheads don't start moving around fast like the fruit flies. Right now I'm alternating between melanogaster and hydei and I have lots of springtails running all over the vivarium floor.

So far I've been ordering 500 pinheads once every 4-5 weeks but I'm going to stop for awhile and try some other type of food along with the usual fruit flies and springtails.

I'm not exactly sure what you mean by your last question. Just regularly dust your fruit flies before feeding them to your frogs. Some people dust them every day and others say they dust 3-4 times a week. I use Repashy Calcium Plus as the main supplement and alternate between a 50/50 mixture of Herptivite and Rep-Cal Calcium with Vit D3? I'm pretty new to Dart Frogs and I've been following this regimen since day one with my frogs and so far I have sixteen Leuc tadpoles and my Azureus are an incredible deep rich shade of blue. That's one of my females in my avatar.

[exasperatus2002]

I used to feed mine, pinheads, fruit flies, termites (they loved them! I didnt, pia to get out of wood) and sweepings from the field with a butterfly net.

[lilblack94gt]

Hmmm.... ok. I will try pinheads again in the future and see how it goes. I know my cobalts go nuts when I dump the flies in. so maybe by just dumping the pinheads in their current enclosure will work better. How many pinheads per frog do you recommend I feed?

My last question, I was asking if anyone knew if the food at the bottom of your fly culture kit was a gutload of some kind. I have gotten my flies from Petco and from joshsfrogs.com. There is always a whitish/cream paste at the bottom of the container that is for the larva to feed from.