Dart frog price tags

[poison beauties]

the only thing JBear is that there are people making a living off just breeding dart frogs. I know a few of them and others that live off what they made in the hobby as far as frogs, bugs and supply sales go.
I do agree that a sale for no other purpose than to make a buck is not needed when there are many hobbyists out there that will do the research before buying. In the last 11 years I have bred and sold a few thousand dart frogs with every one being sold under market value or below board prices but I have had waitlists for most frogs or other means of selling them to qualified herp shops but not everyone is that lucky. If your going to sell them on the boards why not let them go at market value? Underpricing them creates issues in the long run and can drive some species out of the hobby while others are looked at as cheap beginners frogs. I find it funny how the average new hobbyists gets on the boards and posts want ads for sexed or proven pairs before they have even gotten the experience to care for the frogs they want to breed them. I see it as only one reason, to make money. Somehow this hobby turned into a collaboration of many small business's trading frogs back and forth.
To under value a frog and flood the market with them by selling them dirt cheap only hurts the frogs stability in the hobby. When I got into this hobby there was no classifieds full of sexed or proven pairs. you had to do the work yourself.

Michael

[landshark]

Going back to the red eyed tree frog issue, nearly all of the ones I've seen in the local stores are captive born froglets ranging $29-$39.

[bshmerlie]

Baby red eyes are often sold for $20.

[Leefrogs]

ya, and wild caught painted mantellas (flown from madagascar) are 30$ captive born ones are twice that

[VicSkimmr]

Wild caught frogs will always be cheaper than the captive bred equivalent. There is significantly less work (read: cost) involved with providing a wild caught frog.

Let's take R. benedicta for example. Yes they cost a lot of money, as they were just recently brought legally into the hobby, and just recently begun being captive bred. Eventually supply will increase, driving down the cost to a reasonable level. In the mean time, should Mark Pepper eat the costs of all the time and expense he's had to put in to bring them into the hobby just so that every newbie frog keeper can have some? If not Mark, should the first adopters who paid his prices to get them eat all of their extra expense associated with purchasing them?

Is it even right to undercut Mark and all the hard work he put in? Prices on some morphs have decreased dramatically already. This is a lot like the car community and wheels. A company, lets say Volk, designs a great wheel in the TE-37. They spend loads of money in R&D to bring it to the public. Then another company, Rota, simply copies the design and offers it for 25% of the cost of buying the Volk. Is that right?

The fact is that this is an expensive hobby, there's no way around it. If you can't afford to buy what's "hot" right now, wait a few years until they drop in price. Breeders charge a price that buyers are willing to pay, that's just how it works. If the buyers decided it wasn't worth the cost, the market value would drop. If you'd like to help drive the cost down, feel free to go out and purchase expensive frogs and then sell them for pennies on the dollar. Nobody is stopping you.