# Largest thumbnail?



## edwing206 (Apr 9, 2008)

Just wondering what the largest thumbnail out there is. 
I used the search function but came up empty handed. 
Thanks


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## InnoEcto (Jun 28, 2009)

I guess it depends on your definition of thumbnail. Only the Ranitomeya genus? The largest Ranitomeya we have worked with are the fantastica group, specifically benedicta, fantastica, and summersi. Our breeder female benedicta is a beast, but it is hard to get a real measurement.


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## zBrinks (Jul 16, 2006)

I've heard female southern variabilis are huge.


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## thedude (Nov 28, 2007)

i havent seen benedicta and its been a while as far as fants (except the lowlands which are supposed to be smaller), but my southern variabilis trumps summersi easily. BUT! my female ucayali/green lamasi is probably the biggest i have seen.

of course if you mean thumbnail as in, ranitomeya, pums, and quinqs, then its the bigger pums. my blue jean male is 24mm SVL!


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## sports_doc (Nov 15, 2004)

U all suggested the ones that come to my mind....

that said, benedicta girls are the largest!

Anyone have a girl Southern? I appear to have 3.0 :-(
S


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## edwing206 (Apr 9, 2008)

Thanks for the responses everyone. 
I remember your southern variabilis Adam, and they were huge! 
I never really considered pumilio as thumbs, only ranitomeya.


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## thedude (Nov 28, 2007)

all my southerns are 20 mm SVL

lamasi female 21 mm  didnt quite expect those numbers!


shawn, i believe i have 3 around 6 months old i can try sexing soon. not a lot of sexual dimorphism to go off of though.


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## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

I'm working with a 2.2 group of southern variabilis. Admittedly, the females are large. However, I can tell you from my 2.3 benedicta that these females are definitely the largest that I've seen.

Fantastica group frogs (for the most part, obviously there is room for exception like the reticulatus) seem to be rather large in general.

There is one issue that I see with this question, though. In my experience (and in my correspondence with some other more advanced hobbyists) I've found that while most thumbnails' sexual maturity is reached around six months, true full sized adulthood isn't typically reached until 10 to 12 months OOW. When breeding occurs before full size is reached the energy that should be going into growth is put toward the reproductive system and the frogs end up being smaller than they ought to be. So, if a person is not providing adequate time for their thumbnails to reach full size then their collection may not be indicative of the true full size of the frogs....


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## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

thedude said:


> shawn, i believe i have 3 around 6 months old i can try sexing soon. not a lot of sexual dimorphism to go off of though.


Sexual dimorphism in my southern variabilis is probably greater than any other species I have.... It's even more noticable in my friend's trio who lives forty minutes north of me.... I'm only just getting tadpoles in the water, though, so I don't know when the dimorphism starts to become apparent :/


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## edwing206 (Apr 9, 2008)

Interesting information Jake. Thanks for the input.


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## btcope (Jan 7, 2009)

Jake,

Do you think that these frogs would avoid pairing up and breeding prior to 10-12 months in the wild? Is the hobby stunting their growth by pairing them off at 5-6 months? Or would this happen naturally? 

I wonder if kept separately until this 'fully grown adult' size that they'd get the hang of successfully breeding faster than frogs that start trying as soon as they're able.

(Just out of curiosity, I've kept no thumbs yet and don't claim to know much of anything)

Thanks,
Brett


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## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

Personally, I suspect that this is the case for most frogs. I know that I've heard of leucomelas calling as early as five months OOW, but they're not going to hit full size until probably twelve months as well (maybe longer, certainly longer for females). So I don't think this is limited to thumbnails.

I really can't speak to whether or not frogs will breed as soon as they're ready in the wild with any scientific legitimacy as I haven't been exposed to any field research. However, I'll use some common sense to answer this question. The major difference between our glass-box hobby and the wild, in this particular case, is space. I suspect that if a seven month old sexually mature benedicta (although I have a suspicion that due to advances in supplementation we may be hitting sexual maturity in captivity earlier than when it occurs in the wild) were to happen across another sexually mature benedicta that breeding would likely occur. That being said, this is a much different scenario than we have in our glass-box hobby. Put a male and female in the same twenty gallon tank and you have virtually unimpeded exposure to one another, so we may as well be _forcing_ them to breed. In the wild, with relatively vast distances between individual frogs I find it much less likely that frogs so young would regularly breed. So I suspect that yes, those who are pursuing breeding as soon as possible are stunting their frogs' growth.

What I _can_ attest to with some legitimacy (from personal experience and correspondence with other froggers) is the likelihood that we are doing a disservice to our frogs by trying to breed too early. If you look through the archives you'll find quite a number of newer hobbyists posting about dying eggs, dying tadpoles, deformities after morphing. In a lot of these cases we find that the parent frogs are rather young and the advice is "let them do their thing, give them time, they're still young." I think the advice should be to give them more time to acclimate to their new environment and let them grow a little bit more. I know that since I've started waiting before breeding the frogs that I just bought I haven't had a single deformity and my mortality rate for eggs and tadpoles and decreased substantially. I've spoken to people working with benedicta and southern variabilis in similar enclosures to mine, the only known difference being that they've gone straight to breeding and I've hung back (I waited six months after recieving "adult" benedicta and a year and a half from receiving my female variabilis before introducing breeding conditions), for both frogs I've gotten zero deformities and very low loss of pre-metamorphosis stages.

I will grant that this is all anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, but I really do suspect that if hobbyists were to wait to breed their frogs until full size is reached so the frog body is able to appropriate resources appropriately we would have stronger, healthier froglets and a lower mortality rate.


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## btcope (Jan 7, 2009)

So if you're letting them acclimate to their environment, but waiting to breed them, do you mean that you keep them in a dry season with lighter misting/feeding until you feel they are of age? Or are you keeping your pairs split in different vivs until they're older? 

I suppose compared to the natural habitat, our vivs are like that wonderful coed dorm floor freshman year of college...

This makes me wonder about the long term health of adult frogs that a lot of us breed. By pulling eggs and getting them to court/lay continually instead of taking a break to rear tads in btwn are we stripping the parents of resources that they need to maintain their own nutrition? 

I once visited a "Farmer John" back in my home town to see the hen houses where all of our eggs come from. I was pretty shocked to find out that the average hen lays for 6-9 months before her intestines fall out from the continual laying and all of the weird proteins they're given to make them mature at a younger age and lay more frequently. They had a large field out behind the henhouse where they alternated layers of "retired" hens and dirt.

Sorry for hijacking! This got interesting ...


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## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

I don't keep my pairs separated. That seems like a waste of space. I simply don't mist nearly as often as I "should," and I keep breeding conditions rather low. I don't mount film canisters or put any among the leaf litter, for larger frogs I don't put any cocohuts in, I try to keep water in the bromeliads from being deep enough to rear a tadpole in.... Basically I try to provide a comfortable environment for my adult frogs without making it a comfortable place for them to breed in until I feel like they're ready.

I do suspect that some people (particularly those who don't provide an off-season) over-breed their frogs. Think about it, we've got documented cases of frogs that live fifteen or more years, but I've heard of frogs being unable to breed (I suspect from overbreeding) after five or six years of continuous breeding. I'm presonally surprised that a frog laying a clutch every other week continuously would last six years.


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## edwing206 (Apr 9, 2008)

Hijack away, very interesting stuff!


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## thedude (Nov 28, 2007)

SmackoftheGods said:


> Sexual dimorphism in my southern variabilis is probably greater than any other species I have.... It's even more noticable in my friend's trio who lives forty minutes north of me.... I'm only just getting tadpoles in the water, though, so I don't know when the dimorphism starts to become apparent :/


weird, mine have virtually no sexual dimorphism. ive had plenty of froglets and juvies and i havent seen much there either. my male is fatter than both females and they are all the same length. justgoes to show how much variation there is in these awesome frogs.


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## SmackoftheGods (Jan 28, 2009)

thedude said:


> weird, mine have virtually no sexual dimorphism. ive had plenty of froglets and juvies and i havent seen much there either. my male is fatter than both females and they are all the same length. justgoes to show how much variation there is in these awesome frogs.


That's funny. If my males were fatter than my females I'd be severely concerned about obesity (even more so for my friend up north). Now that I've been having success with these guys it's good to know that there aren't any real hard and fast rules about dimorphism in these guys.


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## thedude (Nov 28, 2007)

SmackoftheGods said:


> That's funny. If my males were fatter than my females I'd be severely concerned about obesity (even more so for my friend up north). Now that I've been having success with these guys it's good to know that there aren't any real hard and fast rules about dimorphism in these guys.


i try not to feed enough for them to be obese. even when i got them from understory i thought "wow that huge one is female, and the others are probably male". needless to say i was pretty surprised a couple of days later when the biggest "female" was calling.


in response to what you were saying about keeping your frogs from breeding early on, i agree with you completeley. usually i try not to breed things right away, by misting less and not adding film canisters, but a lot of frogs will still breed. to keep them from over producing though, i just leave eggs in enclosures and let them do all the work. frogs will breed a lot less if they are already taking care of 10+ tads. dry seasons work well too.


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## goku (Nov 11, 2009)

don't know if the biggest, but most of the highland lamasi that I've seen where really big, fair larger than most of the average ranitomeya that i've been able to see


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