Dusting Food for Poisonous Dart Frogs

"Hi! My name is Ricahrd Reavis. I am co-owner of Black Jungle Terrarium Supply and I am here today on behalf of expervillage.com discussing the feeding and supplementation of poison dart frogs. We have discussed the different supplements available as well as feeder insects and now it is time to actually figure out how to use them. The most important part of a supplement is its ability to adhere to the size of the feeder insect that you are feeding. A good supplement will also be very fine in texture. When dusting the feeder insect, you only need to use a very small amount in the dusting container. The reason for this is that once the supplement is outside of its original container it immediately starts degrading. So once you have used the dust in the cup, you don’t want to keep it from day to day as it can start loosing its potency very quickly. So the first step is to put the supplement into the dusting container and in this case here we are going to be feeding fruit flies. Again to make the introduction and control of the fruit flies easier, we are using a funnel to help control them. We begin by tapping the fruit flies down and then sprinkling them into the dusting container. When the appropriate number of flies has been dumped in, we tap them down and then swirl them around into the dust to coat them. You are looking to get a light and even dusting on the insect. You are not trying to get them packed to where they look like little snowman. That can result in actually over supplementation and can even cause some of the frogs not to want to accept the food item. The frequency with which you dust is also important. Typically with young froglets that are growing quickly, we dust daily alternating between vitamin and mineral supplements. We don’t recommend mixing them as the addition of calcium to a vitamin supplement can actually cause its premature degradation. On adult animals, we typically supplement 3 times a week and again alternate between the vitamin and calcium supplementation with one week doing twice as much vitamins as calcium and vice versa."