It’s quiet in the greenhouse

May 18th, 2006

The last couple of months it has become rather quiet in our greenhouse. Now we really have to ‘search’ for our frogs, before, especially in the morning, you saw at least the half of our frogs in full sight jt.jpgsitting or hopping around. First we thought of the possibility of some kind of disease had come into the greenhouse, which could have killed several frogs. But if you look really good, you still can see several frogs. Than you find a tiny weeny pumilio, meanwhile we have as well our first young green trivittatus ashore, several ones, and yesterday we saw a young pictus, so probably there cannot be a real disease in our green house. But still, it does not feel quite well, we keep a close eye at our greenhouse. At the beginning of this year we placed a second ventilator, so the air is circulating better. But maybe this caused the ‘peace’ in our greenhouse. Recently we heard from somebody who has also a tropical greenhouse, that after he was ventilating his greenhouse better, it had negative effects for his animal life. So since a few weeks we switched off the 2nd ventilator, to see if this helps. We still have some problems with the mealy bug, we cannot get rid of it! The parasitic wasps and beetles hardly had any effect and were unfortunately quite fast gone. Last month at the Frogday we had bought a very beautiful large bromeliad fobromelia.jpgr our greenhouse, a great Alcantarea imperialis, with a diameter of more than one meter, with huge armpits full with water. Our old ‘largest’ bromeliad was always very popular as egg deposit place for several kinds of frogs. But is getting worse and its shoots are still not attractive enough for our frogs. We thought this bromeliad would become soon very popular, but apparently our frogs still have to get used to this new bromeliad. A tricolor male found another large bromeliad very attractive and deposited his larva’s in several armpits instead of the pond where he normally deposit his larva’s. Our female pumilio was not that happy with his choice, lately it had become her bromeliad. The pumilio males mostly chase all the other frogs away if they come too close, not the female, she is quite bashful. We finely have 2 offspring females. For several years ‘mom’ had only ‘sons’. Once we thought we had a young female as another male was quite interested in her, but it turned out to be a male as well. Mom is getting at a certain age and you do not want to stay behind with only males. Last year we thought we had bought another female, but it turned out to be a male as well, so we are happy with our young ladies.