Live food for the frogs

Building the greenhouse

One of the main aspects to have frogs in good conditions is the nutrition. Providing them not enough, too much or bad quality of food can bring some problems for the frogs.

The container and the greenhouse

This is the reason that we are improving our live food production where we can control and provide our frogs a good quality and variety of food. Due that temperature in our city is not so warm and because it was too difficult to warm up a room we decided to build a greenhouse where we can hold and raise our own food. 

The greenhouse from inside with earthworms, cockroaches, woodlice, fish and snails

At the moment we are starting with a group of cockroaches (Blaptica dubia) that now are starting to breed much faster with warmer temperatures. Another live food that we are trying to breed is woodlice and pill bugs that are well accepted by our frogs, so we are trying now to breed them.

Breeding cockroaches 

woodlice for our frogs

Earthworms is another group of live food that is very interesting because the nutritional qualities and also that they can survive long time in the water for our aquatic frogs, now we have a good number of earthworms that are breeding and soon will provide a good amount of food.

Earthworms in our greenhouse

Fish and aquatic snails are useful for some of our species and for this reason we are trying to breed some in the aquariums so we can provide the frogs a variety of items that will improve the nutritional status of the frogs.

Fish that are going to be used as food

With all this variety of food and also a better quality we pretend to improve the efficiency and results of our captive breeding program of endangered amphibians.

Telmatobius hintoni with a earthworm

Water quality for the frogs

To keep amphibians in captivity in good conditions we need to be aware of several things, one of these is water quality, especially when we are working with aquatic frogs like we are.

Telmatobius frogs are aquatic frogs that have different dependence of water bodies and some of them are completely aquatic, one case is Titicaca water frog (Telmatobius culeus), that lives just in Titicaca lake in Peru and Bolivia.

Telmatobius culeus one frog that we are trying to breed

Working at the beginning with this frog we had some problems, but after some experiences of water management we were able to fix it. Now that we have a water test equipment we are taking different parameters from different places of Bolivia to know the water quality that different species use and also if there is a variation during the year.

Andrea measuring water quality in one stream

For this component we also are supporting a research that is obtaining information in the wild about different water parameters such as temperature, pH, hardness, alkalinity, ammonium, nitrite, nitrate and phosphates. After obtaining all this information we are trying to replicate these parameters in captivity with different recipes that we are testing.

All this research and information is improving a lot our results in captivity and now we can provide our frogs with a better quality of water that will allow us to breed these species much better.

Andrea measurin water quality in Titicaca lake