Agalychnis.spp Help

[Paul Rust]

Hello all, I have a group of A.moreletii that I am going to breed. I started with 2 WC males, both adults. I then got 3 CB that turned out to be 2 males and 1 female, all juveniles. Over the past 4 months all the males have (mysteriously) died suddenly. They were all in good shape and I found them in the morning floating in the pond. I cannot find any reference to aggression leading to death in this species but then again in the wild there are no CB specimens that may not have the "killer" instinct to defend themselves against a seasoned wild adult male. Now to the question, sorry for the long intro. Has anyone heard of Agalychnis.spp being aggessive to the point of death even if subtly causing the victim to stop eating and die? Did the WC male weed out the competition? At this point the WC male and the remaining CB female are in amplexus. Thanks for the help.

[SethD]

I would doubt that the wild caught male had anything to do with the death of the CB males. Immature CB tree frogs sometimes do show a tendency to die for unexplained reasons. A few years ago I got four young CB bicolors and lost them all over the space of five months or so. Same situation as you describe, no visible issues and all ate but just found each of them dead some morning one by one. My personal gut feeling is that this type of sudden death syndrome has something to do with insufficient supplementation of some mineral or vitamin that is particularly important for growing frogs. Using a shotgun approach by using a number of different supplements seems to reduce the frequency of such occurrences.

[Paul Rust]

I would doubt that the wild caught male had anything to do with the death of the CB males. Immature CB tree frogs sometimes do show a tendency to die for unexplained reasons. A few years ago I got four young CB bicolors and lost them all over the space of five months or so. Same situation as you describe, no visible issues and all ate but just found each of them dead some morning one by one. My personal gut feeling is that this type of sudden death syndrome has something to do with insufficient supplementation of some mineral or vitamin that is particularly important for growing frogs. Using a shotgun approach by using a number of different supplements seems to reduce the frequency of such occurrences.

That's a relief Seth. I gut load my crickets with a calcium and vitamin rich cat food based food. You think I should dust as well when they are young?

[SethD]

That's a relief Seth. I gut load my crickets with a calcium and vitamin rich cat food based food. You think I should dust as well when they are young?

If your not dusting at all definitely do so with at the least a good quality broad spectrum supplement like repashy ICB. That one supplement right there is pretty good and may be enough to cure all such sudden death issues. In my experience gut loading isn't enough for most captive frogs. I think supplementation is by far the most important in young frogs too. Many times adults can seem to do fine for a long time with no supplementation at all because they have reserves to draw on and are not growing. Young frogs suffer from deficiencies much sooner.

[Paul Rust]

If your not dusting at all definitely do so with at the least a good quality broad spectrum supplement like repashy ICB. That one supplement right there is pretty good and may be enough to cure all such sudden death issues. In my experience gut loading isn't enough for most captive frogs. I think supplementation is by far the most important in young frogs too. Many times adults can seem to do fine for a long time with no supplementation at all because they have reserves to draw on and are not growing. Young frogs suffer from deficiencies much sooner.

I often wondered if gut loading was going to be enough because I dust my dart frogs' fruit flies every time and have never lost one. I will definately start dusting tonight. Thanks for the quick response Seth.

[John]

Personally I'm at a loss as to what could be the cause. There are just too many possibilities. Perhaps a vet could do a few swabs from a corpse to see what possible diseases it had?