Above are a female (left) and male (right) "panama canal" morph D. auratus. Below are the other frogs that I received in the order. I believe that they are the same morph but are not marked as well as the two above. The one on the left seems to be second female. The one next to it with almost the same pattern is a male and the one on the bottom looks to be another female. It looks like this group is 2:3 The sexes are not proven, but the sexual dimorphism is size of the adults and these are all adults.
The frogs were farm raised in Panama, but I do not have any information on the specific location. Right now we have all these guys in quarantine where they will stay for the next 90 days. After that, we will get them in their permanent enclosures. We are keeping them in a large clear Rubbermaid sweater box with our soil mix, oak and magnolia leaves. We have also planted some pathos in this container. We will move all 5 frogs into a new container with a similar setup after 30 days. We kept the frogs on paper towels for a couple days so that we could get some fecal samples, but that seemed to really stress them out. The group is eating well now, although initially they were pretty thin. We fed them a few small meals (20 flies total) each day. This allows their system to become accustomed to food. Frogs can literally eat them selves to death, so you have to be careful with the size of the meal. We had auratus years ago, but these are much shyer. We will see if that changes in time.
Update 8/25 : The fecal samples came back surprisingly clean. I have moved the frogs to a second quarantine enclosure and they have gained a lot of weight, they are also becoming bolder. It is still tough to get good pictures when they are in sweater boxes. I did see the male on the top right calling a couple times so I'm hoping that when we get them out of quarantine that they start to breed.
Update: The frogs have been placed in their new enclosure, but they are going to have to be moved again. They are extremely sensitive to light. The "new" enclosure is vertically oriented (not the best set up for auratus to begin with) so the plant growth is not heavy on the floor of the vivarium. I have 2 inches of magnolia and oak leaves on the bottom and they stay under it all day. I plan to move them to a heavily planted 29 gallon vivarium. |
