Feeling Discouraged...

[DigitalPunk]

Chelsea,

Sorry you have been struggling with food for your frogs. Short answer is - No it is not to long.

but I would encourage you to not give up if you feel like you can succeed. Take a deep breath and lets think this through.

How many flies do your frogs eat a night? Then try to guesstimate how many cultures a week they will consume. Without knowing much of anything I would guess your frogs probably consume 1 - 2 cultures a week between the 3 of them. Maybe more like 1.5 cultures.

So I would first start buy ordering 3 or 4 fruit fly cultures... maybe even 5. Also order some supplies for culturing your own fruit flies. If you order from NeHerp you can choose that you want a mix of freshly started cultures and producing ones.

When they come in take the producing ones and separate them from the others. Write on them with a sharpie to show you the 2 you are feeding from. Set the other 2 - 3 aside and let them produce. If they are fresh cultures it could take up to 2 weeks from the date they were setup to hatch the first round of flies. NeHerp writes on the labels the day they made them. Use these to help guess when you can expect them to produce.

Once you are 7 days out (7 days from the setup date for the cultures) from the 2 or 3 you have producing setup 3 - 4 more (you always want to have aroubd twice as many flies on hand to feed than you actually need. this will help ease the stress. Then every 7 days make another 4 cultures. Let your frogs grow a bit more so that maybe small crickets would work. Then order 500 - 1000 pinheads. Keep the flies going on the side and make a not when you got the crickets and then see how long they last before they get to big. (I bet they last 3 - 5 weeks)


Another thing to be watching for with the fruit flies is not adding so many in the tank at once that more of them escape than are eaten. It is better to add a few and watch them die then add some more. This will help control your FF loses.

[ColleenT]

Petco sells melanogaster FF. the jars are $10 but it's good in an emergency. i had to get a jar, and the ff are very active and there are a ton in there. my baby Grays were onto small crix pretty fast. i tried to find pinheads, but it's not easy to get them here. so they started on xsmall crix and they did great. they are still doing very well. all i can say is try it but supervise for a while.