The animals should have some overview over the bottom of the vivarium

Males and their call

Their call, a buzzing, cricket like ‘wekwekwekwekwek’ is to be heard even on locations where one acquainted to this call would not expected it. The frogs like a warm and humid climate, tranquility and a view. The latter means they want to have an overview of a few meters in front of them, to see any intruders intruding. In the forest, they mainly live where large trees with wide roots grow.  In dense secondary growth with lots of rather slender trunks instead of a few wide ones, strawberry poison frogs are rare.

Males like to have a seat on an elevation about a meter from the forest floor where they have an overview over their territory. In the early morning hours, just after dawn, they start calling. Depending on the weather, they keep calling throughout the day. In the warm afternoon their calling activity is diminished, but even then they call occasionally.
If it starts raining, the males seem to disappear and then it looks as if the females become more active. The frogs aren’t very shy. They will not let themselves be caught and certainly will jump away when someone comes too close, but on average, they seem very convinced they do not need to worry too much. Their toxicity gives them self-confidence, it seems.

 

A female on the forest floor of Guapilès, Costa Rica

Eating and reproducing

The frogs spend their time eating and reproducing.
They find food between the rotting leaves on the forest floor. There they find mites, ants and a lot of other animals almost invisible to our human naked eye.
These little forest floor dwellers they need as food but also for producing the toxins on their skin. In captivity they can live for years on vitamin and mineral enriched fruit flies, but then they loose their toxicity little by little. Strawberry poison frogs aren’t that poisonous, but on open wounds and mucosa they can still hurt. If the frogs get meadow sweepings along with their usual vivarium-foods, they can stay toxic much longer. They also show they like larger prey as well. They attack caterpillars and spiders ten times the weight of fruit flies then.
 

Males keep their territory free of other males. They get very excited by hearing other strawberry frogs call. Intruders are expelled from the territory with force. In nature they can be fooled with tape recordings. They can not really discern between real frog sound and taping and will walk angrily around a speaker playing the frogs call.

If two males meet then, they will put up a fight. They attack each other like miniature wrestlers, which looks funny but really is a matter of life and death. In these fights they can kill each other. In vivaria, they will attack frogs of other species as well, even if these are three times as heavy. The strawberry frogs will be the victors of these fights but that may mean the looser lies belly up in the water, dead. Therefore I would advise to keep these frogs in pairs only. In studies in nature it has been recorded the females fight as well. So even housing two females together can cause problems.

 

A female strawberry poison frog
with a larva on heir back



    

Left: Larva on the edge of metamorphosing
Middle: A view days after
metamorphosing it is barely red
Right: After six months it looks
already like a strawberry poison frog

Breeding

As long as the males are busy defending their territory they won’t have time to fertilize eggs. So the breeding has to wait until there is only one male left. From that moment on, a pair can produce eggs and larvae regularly. After about ten days the eggs hatch and the little larvae will crawl on the back of the female. She takes them to a small puddle somewhere, in the leaf-axils of a Bromeliad or Dieffenbachia or something like that. There they are safe for predators like fish and the voracious aquatic insect larvae, which haunt larger bodies of open water. But, there isn’t much to feed on in such small puddles as well. So the female takes care for that herself.

About once a week, the female deposits a few eggs in the puddle with the larva. Such eggs are the only food for the larvae and a good substitute has not been found yet, despite many experiences among hobbyists.  This means that raising the larvae has to be left to the females. The problem is, someday the larvae will metamorphose and the small reddish brown little frogs will disappear from sight. Because of that, it is easier if the frogs drop their larvae in artificial ponds like photo containers. These can easily be extracted from the vivarium and brought in to another where the frogs can be raised in.In my experience the frogs do best when raised individually. In a small aquarium, filled with dead leaves and pieces of fern root and in which a springtail-culture has been established, a single frog will reach adulthood within a year. The breeding results of frogs like the Strawberry poison frog and other species with egg-eating larvae are rather disappointing as compared to other Dendrobatids.  It does seem however that the frogs are more productive if they are given a lot of very small food items. In summers when I fed large amounts of grass-mites (from meadow-sweepings) they bred better then in other years.

 

The vivarium

A vivarium for Strawberry poison frogs may be beautifully planted, but the animals should have some overview over the bottom of it. They would like an empty floor with overhanging vegetation.  Furthermore it should be humid, but these frogs are not very found of walking over wet earth all day. They should have dry spots to sit as well.

Their temperature requirements are not that high. In nature the temperatures on their forest floor are between 22 and 24 deg Celsius in the early morning to 28 deg Celsius on a hot afternoon. In vivaria they do not really mind if the temperature is a little lower. One winter when temperatures in my vivarium became as low as 16 by night and barely 21 by day, the frogs kept on producing and feeding larvae just as well. On the other hand, both the animals of my breeding pair died during a heath wave.

 

Dendrobates pumilio variant bri-bri dark morphe

Morphes

In Costa Rica Dendrobates pumilio is variable within a certain boundaries. All frogs are red with dark feet. Red can be red brown, orange or really like strawberries. The dark feet can be just the hands and feet, part of the legs or even the whole legs, and dark may be black, dark brown, or blue. Enough variation, but over the border, in Panama, the variation is even more dazzling. There they can be red, green with yellow and brown spots or red with white and brown spots (even siblings can differ that much on Bastimentos). Others are metallic blue or green, creamy white with dark brown and so on. These Panama animals are usually a little easier to keep in captivity then the Costa Rican types. Almost all-captive bred D. pumilio are from Panama originally. They are also less aggressive. There are a couple of other differences between them and it seems like a matter of time to me until the Panama types will regain their old species status as Dendrobates galindoi.

 

Conservation

As said, Dendrobates pumilio is bred only rarely and therefore hard to get nowadays.
For some twenty years ago it was one of the most imported species of Dendrobatids but now it is rare in captivity. All dendrobatids fall under CITES rules even if even the most gloomy pessimist cannot look upon Dendrobates pumilio as a threatened species.  But import is very restricted due to these regulations. In Nicaragua, an attempt to breed these animals commercially in a special frog farm has stranded on the reluctance of European knowledgeable. Indeed it is hard to breed animals with such strong territorial instincts in large amounts, but with some enrichment of breeding spots with rotting fruit and extra larvae deposit spots it is really possible. But, what cannot be exported does not pay either. So it has been more lucrative to slash the would-be frog farms forest and plant bananas...

So much for conservation.