Going on Vacation: How to Keep Your Dart Frogs Fed

By Allen Booth and Derick Michael

Allen has 30+ years in the exotics industry. Derick runs MLE's dart frog breeding program in New Jersey.

Leaving town is one of the most common things people worry about when they get into dart frogs. The good news: for most trips, there's far less to do than you'd think. Dart frogs are not needy animals. The real risk when you're away isn't hunger — it's the enclosure itself. More on that below, but first, feeding.

A day or two: do nothing

If you're gone for a day or two, you don't need to do anything. Your frogs will be fine. Feed before you leave like normal and go.

A few days: just overfeed

For a few days, overfeed before you leave. Use common sense on how much. The banana test tells you if you've got it right: drop a small piece of banana in the terrarium, and after the frogs have fed there should still be a good amount of flies left on it. If there's nothing left, you fed too little.

The banana test comes from our fruit fly articles — the banana draws the flies into the open so you can see how many are actually still in there.

A week or a little more: the culture-in-the-terrarium trick

This is my go-to for most trips of about a week. It's simple and it works.

Overfeed before you leave, like above. Then take a fruit fly culture — one with flies in it, but not one that's truly booming — punch some holes in the lid, and put the whole deli container right in the terrarium. The flies work their way out slowly over the following days, so the frogs get a steady trickle of food instead of everything at once.

The one tradeoff: you can't dust the flies with vitamins while you're away. That's fine. If you're dusting at every other feeding the rest of the time, missing a week doesn't matter.

What about froglets?

Froglets are the animals people worry about most, and for good reason — they have almost no reserves. But for vacation they're not a special problem. Treat them the same way, just add springtails. Put a banana in, overfeed with both flies and springtails, and you can do the deli-cup trick with them too. Between the springtails already in the enclosure and the culture releasing flies, they'll be fed.

Longer than that: get a frog person

If you're gone longer, or you'd just rather not gamble, the best option is another frog keeper. If you've built a community of people near you, ask one of them to come over every other day and take care of the frogs the way you would. This is exactly why building those local relationships matters — it's the same reason a fellow keeper can save you when a culture crashes.

More on why the local community is worth building: Fruit Fly Secrets.

The part that actually matters: the enclosure

Feeding is the easy part. What actually kills frogs when you're away is the enclosure failing. This is where to put your attention.

Automatic misters

If you're leaving for more than a few days and you don't have automatic misters, it's time to get them. The problem with having someone hand-mist for you isn't the misting itself — it's that every time an inexperienced person opens an enclosure, something can go wrong. A frog gets out. The door doesn't get latched all the way. And now you've got a much bigger problem than a dry tank. The safest setup is one where nobody needs to open the enclosures at all, and automatic misters get you there. Just bite the bullet and get them. It's the single best thing you can do to make leaving town a non-event.

Eggs

This one is for anyone pulling eggs to raise them separately. (Oophaga keepers, this doesn't apply to you — their eggs stay with the parents.) If you remove eggs and keep them in petri dishes, those dishes have to stay hydrated or the eggs dry out and die. And you can't just soak them before you leave — overwater them and they'll die too. So they need tending while you're gone, which means either a person who knows exactly what they're doing, or a setup that handles it for you.

What I do: I keep mine in a bin with a small, cheap mister dedicated just to that. I test it for about a week before I leave to make sure it's holding the right humidity, and once I know it's dialed in, I'm good to go. Set it up early enough to actually watch it work — you don't want to find out it's misting too much or too little on the day you're walking out the door.

Power failure

This is the big one. If the power goes out while you're away and it's really hot or cold outside, that can kill your frogs. Make sure you have some kind of notification that tells you if the power drops — a lot of smart plugs and home systems will alert your phone. If you're running a lot of animals, backup generators are worth it.

A camera

Something like a Ring camera set up in your frog area lets you check remotely that everything's running. It won't fix a problem, but it'll tell you there is one while you can still call someone.

The person already coming over

You probably already have someone stopping by to grab the mail or take care of the cats and dogs. We've used apps to find someone to watch our cats, and I just ask that person to check on the frogs too. I don't ask them to feed or open anything — just make sure the power is on and there are no leaks in the automatic misters. Keep the ask small and keep them out of the enclosures, and they'll actually do it right.