How Often to Feed Dart Frogs (And What to Dust With)

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.

When someone gets their first dart frogs, the questions come in almost the same order every time. How often do I feed them? How much? And what am I supposed to be dusting the flies with? It's one of the most common things new keepers ask us, and the answers are simpler than most people expect. Here's exactly how we do it.

How often to feed

For adult frogs, we feed three times a week. That's it. Dart frogs don't need to eat every day as adults, and three feedings a week keeps them in good shape without overdoing it.

Froglets and juveniles are different. They're growing, and they have almost no reserves, so they need to eat more often. We'll get into their amounts below, but the short version is: adults three times a week, young frogs more.

How much to feed

This is the part nobody explains well, so here's exactly what we do.

For a pair of adults: take a 4 oz deli cup and tap your dusted flies into it. Not packed down, just loose flies filling the cup. That's a good amount for two frogs. It gives you a consistent measure instead of guessing every time.

Scale it from there. Four adults? Double it, so two deli cups' worth. Six adults, triple it, and so on. Once you've got the pair measurement in your head, the rest is just math.

For offspring: if it's just one or two froglets, I sprinkle in maybe 20 to 25 flies. That's plenty for that stage. Once you get up to around six offspring in a grow-out, I treat them like two adults, that 4 oz cup, but I feed them daily instead of three times a week, because they're growing.

The one thing I watch with the froglets: if I go to feed and there are still a lot of flies in there from the day before (the banana will tell you), I just skip that day. You don't want flies piling up. Feed daily as the default for a group of growing froglets, but let what you see override the schedule.

What to dust with

Every feeding, your flies get dusted with a supplement before they go in the tank. This is not optional. Captive frogs eating nothing but fruit flies will develop deficiencies without it, and the two big ones, calcium and vitamin A, are exactly what cause the health and breeding problems people run into. Dusting is how you prevent all of that.

Here's the rotation we run, three feedings a week:

• Feeding 1: All-in-one supplement + carotenoid, dusted together
• Feeding 2: Calcium with D3
• Feeding 3: All-in-one supplement

That gives your frogs, every week: a solid calcium load once, your broad-spectrum vitamin and mineral base twice, and color and vitality worked in on one of those feedings. Dusting two powders together (the all-in-one and the carotenoid on that first feeding) is easy, just add both to the cup and give it a shake before you tap the flies in.

Keep the same rotation for froglets. They're eating more often, but the supplement pattern stays the same.

The supplement we use, and why

People ask what we dust with, so let's be straight about it. We use Tincman Herps supplements, and they're the only line we carry. That's not because we get paid to say so. It's because it's what we use on our own frogs, and after trying other things, it's what we landed on.

First, let's be fair: Repashy is a good product. A lot of excellent keepers use it, it's proven, and if that's what you're running, you're not doing anything wrong. We're not here to talk anyone out of a supplement that works.

We went with Tincman for a few specific reasons:

• It's modular. Instead of one do-everything powder, you get individual pieces, calcium, the all-in-one, the carotenoid, that you rotate. That gives us more control over exactly what our frogs are getting and when, which matters a lot when you're breeding.
• The grind is ultrafine. It clings to fruit flies instead of falling off before the frog eats them. With something as small as a fly, that actually makes a difference in how much supplement makes it into the animal.
• The calcium is dual-sourced. It uses two calcium sources aimed at better absorption, and it's phosphorus-free, which is what you want for amphibians.
• It's what the serious breeders use. Tincman is what Tesoros and a lot of the breeders we respect run on their own collections. In this hobby, that kind of track record means something.

That's our honest take. It's the best fit we've found for how we keep and breed, so it's what we sell. If you want to make it simple, we put the three we use into a complete bundle with this exact feeding schedule included.