Hey and welcome to the forum!

1. A glass lid - Due to the high humidity requirements you will need to use glass to trap all that sweet humidity in the tank.

2. Yes Mantella need live plants.

3. yes you will want a light and LED will work fine. With the live plants you will need 6500K lighting and LED lights are capable of that.



Mantella are a great frog, but are not super simple to care for. Before you buy them I HIGHLY recommend you practice culturing fruit flies and have your tank setup at least a month in advance. Having the tank setup so early will allow you to tweak the tank to get your temp and humidity figured out and allow your live plants to get rooted in place.

In your tank you will want to add Springtails and Isopods to the substrate. They will help keep your tank clean and will be eaten by your frogs as a snack. Because your frogs will be eating them you will either want to setup breeding boxes for them so you can "grow your own" or you will need to order a new culture roughly every 30 days.

I would encourage you to get an easier frog to start with and get your fruit fly culturing under control and figured out and learn from your first tank build so you can apply the things you learn on the first tank to the mantella tank. Just my 2 cents.