After one month

January 24th, 2004

After one month ‘running’, the first problems start. A few spots are completely covered by mite. These are the spots we throw organic waste, like fruit, but you do not find the mite at all those spots. We have to see and watch how this will develop, we do not want the mite to conquer the whole greenhouse. The fruit flies are becoming flying fruit flies, no problem for the frogs, just a little annoying for us, they love our faces. We had our first clutches, but the males did not take care of the clutches. So the fruit flies enjoyed free play and laid their eggs into these clutches and their grubs started to eat the eggs.  Uorchidee.jpgnfortunately the young terriblis did not make it. He had already stayed behind with the other terriblis, we hoped he would recover in the greenhouse, with more than enough nourishment. But although he eat well, he did not make it. First it looked like he really enjoyed the streams, but this week we found him death next to the pond. Also the trivittatus female with the broken leg has some problems, she is getting a little skinny and slower. With a broken leg it is harder to find your food in the greenhouse than in a terrarium. Some other frogs are really getting ‘thick’, they can eat now all day. In their terrarium if the food was eaten, they had to wait sometimes a couple of days. We wanted to have enough food in the greenhouse, it has to be self-supplying, so we put a lot of different insects in it and this goes very well. It is only difficult to take care that the frogs get their ‘vitamins’. You cannot easily powder the insects. You can put sometimes an extra jar with powdered fruit flies into the greenhouse, but the frogs are all over the greenhouse, if they finely find those powdered fruit flies, most of the powder has already gone.

You never have a dull moment in the greenhouse, there is always something to watch. Most of the frogs are quite active during the morning and scrape around. Only the trivittatus you see often sitting quietly at a certain spot, until a tricolor gets annoyed and wants to drive the trivittatus away. In which they often succeed. But yesterday I saw the healthy female ignoring an intrusive tricolor, who finally slinked away.