Stages of Poisonous Dart Tadpole Development

"Hi! My name is Richard Rivas, co-owner of Black Jungle Terrarium Supply and today I am here on behalf of expertvillage.com discussing how to bring your poison dart frogs from the egg stage all the way up into froglets. At this point we have already pulled the eggs and have catalogued them and set them up for development and now we are going to track the stages of development until they hatch. Here we have a clutch that has just been recently laid; the eggs have started development although there is nothing really that noticeable to see at this point. Within generally about 10 days or so, the development has progressed to a point where you can actually see the small embryos set on top of the egg as they continued development. At this point, external gills have become obvious and movement can also be seen. By the time the eggs are about 2 to 2 ½ weeks old, they are just about at the stage where they are ready to hatch. At this point, there is still the left gill visible. It has not atrophied yet but the right one has been brought into the body with the skin growing over it. At this point it is just a matter usually another 2 or 3 days until the tadpoles hatch and then finally at about 2 ½ weeks, the tadpoles have hatched and wiggle free of their gel membranes. At this point, they will be removed and put into the rearing bins. The length of time required for the development is entirely temperature dependent but typically the average clutch takes about 2 to 2 ½ weeks to reach its full development and hatch. Temperatures that are too warm will cause much more rapid hatching but can have long term ill health effects on the tadpoles. Whereas temperatures that are too low may require an extra few days to hatch but don’t seem to have the same long term health effects that too warm of temperatures will cause."