Some further notes on keeping D. imitator

Justin Yeager
Last update: 17 August 2002

I've bred D. imitator for years now, and with several of my females over this time I would get clutches of four eggs on about the same time period as you mentioned (on the Website.)

My tanks were planted much more heavily, and I didn't keep many bromeliads in my breeding tanks. I liked to get many larger leaved plants that would overlap their leaves. Anywhere there were overlapped leaves I could expect to find eggs. In fact, I would deliberately overlap leaves so that the frogs would lay there.

D. imitator is definitely a very easy frog to reproduce and to care for. To illustrate this, I have two comical stories about their parental care, and general ease of raising.

One tank, about 50 gallons, I would mist very heavily (this was the breeding tank.) Eventually, due to the build-up of the water used in misting, the water level would overflow, and the soil would become very wet. In fact, there were some small puddles in the back corners of the tank. Eventually I wanted to stop their breeding (easier said than done) because I found that the eggs had less and less jelly around them. I took this to be a sign that they needed to take a break and rest. I took advantage of this time to re-landscape their tank.

This involved scooping out the dirt base, but in doing so I kept finding tadpoles in various stages of development in the soggy dirt. By the time the job was completed, I had about six mostly formed tadpoles. I sincerely doubt that they were fed unfertilized eggs, so they must have just eaten Drosophila or - who knows what?

The other incident that comes to mind was when I was planning a new tank, and I wanted to take a Neoregelia splendens from one tank and put it into another. I usually don't do this, and I always preach against it but, from time to time, you break your own rules! Well, I cleaned it out and wiped the leaves dry. After planting it in the tank (which contained two pairs of D. tinctorius FG) I sprayed it heavily and the vase filled back up.

About a month later I swore I saw a tiny froglet in the tank. It was way too small to be a D. tinctorius, and so I dug around. To my surprise, I found a baby D. imitator. It was a little smaller than the ones that I rear myself, but he was in great health. There were very few flies in the bromeliad, but this little guy must have been deep in the bromeliad vase, and morphed out just eating whatever algae or flies were in there.

It took me a week or so to discover how a D. imitator (none of their tanks were remotely close to the tinctorius tanks) had gotten inside their tank. After I caught him, I kept him for several years as my miracle baby!

On clutch size
A female of mine laid clutches of four. She was older (about four or so) when she began laying the larger clutches. I've only found one other person who had those size clutches, and his female also killed several of the males she mated with. She was a beast.

Natural versus artificial rearing
About the froglets they raise. They always are smaller in my experience, but they are very hardy. They also seem to grow a little slower, but that again may just be because of how large the ones I rear end up. Sometimes it's hard to tell one that's two weeks old from an adult. Is the D. imitator you have the ones that we sometimes call the Panguana lamasi? (Yes, it is from Panguana.)  We don't have many of those in the US, but I hear they're pretty nice.  I like the imitator group much more than DD. ventrimaculatus, fantasticus, and variabilis.

How are the IGF shows? We just had our big show in the US, IAD (International Amphibian Day), and we had a blast. That's where I got those solid orange galactonotus. There were some cool Pope Island green D. pumilio (CB) I wanted to get also, but I'll wait a bit before I buy them. 

Justin Yeager yeager@udel.edu 
Check out my site http://yeagersfrogs.homestead.com/homepage.html 
Also, check out the NEW and IMPROVED International Amphibian Day site www.intlamphibday.org