Adults do well on a range of cultured and wild-caught foods. It appears that variety is the key. Interestingly, food type and feeding frequency may be implicated in triggering successful spawning. This may be particularly relevant to traditionally harder species to breed. For example, in the 2002 season I was very pleased to breed viridis. Shortly before they bred we had been adding large quantities of aphids on sycamore trees, which we saw the viridis avidly picking off – perhaps this was the trigger that brought us success?

Each of the cultured and wild-caught foods will be discussed in turn.

CULTURED FOODS

Microcrickets are one of the best cultured foods to use. If ordered from the right company they can be cheap, consistently high quality, and nutritious. I order my “micros” from a company that sells micro ‘banded crickets’ for £6 for 3 tubs. The micros I receive are hatchlings, which is great for my froglets. In order to make sure that the micros are a nutritious food, I gut load them prior to feeding them to the frogs. I used two alternative food sources for gut-loading: (1) I feed them a fish food pond stick brand, which the crickets go mad over. (2) I feed them with “Turbo Tadpole” (see section on feeding tadpoles). I’m not sure whether the crickets are quite as keen on the Turbo Tadpole, but they do go green very quickly! I got the idea of feeding Turbo Tadpole to micros when my viridis tadpoles were not doing well on this diet, while the pulchra tadpoles were. I thought: “how can I get this healthy food mix into the frogs?” Answer: by gut-loading the micros with it!

Fruit flies are also a good cultured food to use. However, I’m still trying to think of a good way to gut-load them.

Curly wing flies are also a good food. They are lapped up by viridis (for which curly wing flies are a mere morsel), but are taken with a little more effort involved by the smaller species.

WILD COLLECTED FOODS

Aphids and springtails are the wild collected foods I use the most. I collect aphids from sycamore leaves when they are available. Viridis (in particular) and pulchra seem to go wild over these aphids. My aurantiaca are a little more reluctanct - perhaps because I have had them for much longer and did not give them such a varied diet for the first few years, while I was still extremely inexperienced in mantella husbandry. Springtails are a great food for all frogs (adults and froglets), and can be relatively easily cultured (will explain more soon). Check out this picture of a spring tail colony in full spring!

DUSTING

I did not use multivitamin supplement powders until very recently, so I am unsure of their effect. However, I feel that I should have been using them for a lot longer! I do expect them to have clear beneficial effects on the frogs.