# Paludaria and Dart Frogs - A Discussion



## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

Hello, Folks. 
I have seen an unusual number of paludarium build threads lately and it has got me thinking...

First off, let me say that the tanks I have been seeing are beautiful - you have really done a great job with these! As always, I never mean to single people out when I start or comment on a thread and I really am looking to start a discussion here. I recognize that not all situations are the same and that what works for one person might not work for everyone. I would really like to talk about dart frogs in paludaria with an eye toward best practices and what we want inexperienced people to know about this combination.

One of my favorite things about building vivs is this sort of slice-of-nature idea that you can have a little piece of rain forest in your home. For me, it isn't about exactly duplicating what a random 2 square foot chunk of rain forest looks like. It's all about creating what I like to call a "hyper-real" impression of the kinds of things you would see in different places in a rain forest and rendering it down to something that fits in my living room. I also get that streams, rivers, and lakes are a part of what you would see in a rain forest, so why would you not include them in a hyper-real vivarium? 

Then there are dart frogs. They are my favorite type of animal by far. They are gorgeous, are fun to keep (in most cases, after some research), and they exhibit really interesting behaviors. They are a natural pairing for a hyper-real vivarium. 

So, I get the desire to build a paludarium and keep dart frogs in it. However, are dart frogs the best inhabitant for this environment? I ask this honestly, even though I will admit that the idea scares me at and at this phase of my dart-keeping journey, I don't think I would do it. I might be wrong, though - hence this thread. I am stipulating that there are great aesthetic reasons (and other reasons?) for keeping darts in a paludarium, but here are the things that make me think that it might not be a great idea:


Dart frogs aren't especially good swimmers - they don't have webbed feet
My dart frogs are sometimes clumsy and will fall off of high perches - I can't see how they wouldn't eventually fall in the paludarium water
Can dart frogs easily climb out of the water anywhere (glass, vertical water edge, etc.)?
Are dart frogs smart enough to remember where a place is to easily climb out of the water (a rock or stick at an incline, for instance)?
Isn't a pauldarium depriving dart frogs of valuable land space?
I want especially to hear from people who have had darts in paludaria for a long time (or other folks who just want to weigh in  I have these questions:


How long have you had darts in your paludarium?
What species/morph have you kept in a paludarium? Do you think it matters which species/morph?
How deep is the water? Do you think that matters?
Does it matter what species you keep in the water portion (I know...no piranha)?
Would you recommend keeping darts in a paludarium? Does your recommendation depend on how much experience with aquaria/paludaria/dart frog keeping a person has?

My current position on darts in paludaria leans toward thinking that we should be building our tanks with the dart frog morph/species in mind and that putting them in a paludarium doesn't really reflect this approach. I am trying to keep an open mind, though, and am looking forward to changing my thinking based on what you all think (especially those who have kept darts in pauldaria for long periods of time).

Again, I am not trying to be divisive - I just want to get a discussion going and it seemed like a while since that had happened on this subject.

Thanks!

Mark


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## indrap (Aug 28, 2018)

Interesting topic Mark! What would you define as a pauladarium? any enclosure containing an exposed water feature? In larger enclosures (bigger than 18x18 footprint) I enjoy having a pond feature. I think that they are an aesthetically pleasing way to increase humidity, act as a tadpole site if you are tank raising, and act as an easily accessible area to siphon water out when it gets too high. I think this can be done without sacrificing much space, and the frogs that I have all seem to sit around and wade in the pool from time to time (water is like a couple cm high at most). I never let it get too high in fear of a frog drowning, therefore it's always "usable" floor space.

I think any smaller than 18x18 and I'd be concerned that I wasnt giving the frogs enough land, so in my 12x12x18s I use a plastic bottle that I silicone to the bottom of the tank. It's easy to siphon water out, however not as convenient or neat looking as a pond.

I have never made a waterfall feature or anything of the sort but I imagine it would take more space, and theres potentially a bigger risk of frogs drowning since you need enough water for the pump to work.


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## HawpScotch (Oct 4, 2018)

There does seem to be a mostly rigid consensus here that water features are bad. Ive only recently jumped back in to the hobby but previously had auratus in a tank with a stream on one side of the tank and it didn’t seem to adversely affect them aside from losing some floor space. 

I’m by no means an expert here but there are some frogs that may like water features more than others. ameerega bassleri for example.

A lot can go wrong with water features. A whole lot. So I believe the complexity is as much as reason as anything. There are threads here discussing that frogs drowning is likely far lower of a risk than it’s made out to be. Though I don’t have enough experience with deep ponds in tanks to know myself.

The lack of frogs ability to control body temp when they are too wet is a commonly cited reason to avoid them, that and pathogens the frogs could catch from whatever aquatic creatures that may end up in the water.

I think we should try to do this right but I also think we should be more open minded to water features. I personally feel it’s a little disingenuous when people scream about how a water feature isn’t in the best interest of a frog. As if keeping them confined to small glass boxes is....


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## Philsuma (Jul 18, 2006)

hell, the average Dart Frog Hobbyist posting here has only a year or two under his/her belt. 98% of all 'Paludarian comments' come from people with 1 viv and @ 6 months experience and some leucs or tincs and they got lucky and didn't have any drownings...yet. And they loudly proclaim ' "I have a paludarium and NONE of my frogs have any problems".

1-2 years experience....


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## gonzalez (Mar 28, 2018)

I don't see why people would complain so much about something that isn't in the perfect interest of a frog when they are still able to live happily. Nothing on encyclia, I've just seen people do that a lot reading through the board. Let what works work. I don't think a tank has to have leaf litter if it's scaped properly, and paludarium can be done too. Now, sometimes people do things in a way that harms the frogs or takes up too much space, and that is not ok, but who cares if the frogs are safe and have a acceptable amount of space.

Does anybody have a link to that one thread with the 15 foot paludarium that the frogs existed in happily for years? The water area was deep enough to have stingrays and gar. I think it has to do with scaping more than anything, and people are discouraged because of how catastrophically it can go wrong.

Just my 0.2, I've never made a paludarium, but from reading different places and on the board I've seen that in certain situations it can work without putting harm on the inhabitants. 

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk


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## varanoid (Jan 21, 2011)

I applaud the manner in which you have got this discussion going. And I'll say that I am probably exactly where you are right now with your view of dart frogs and paludariums. Skeptical, but open minded. Don't get me wrong though, my jaw drops when I see some of the paludariums out there. 

At this point in my frog keeping career, I don't think I'll ever try a paludarium again. I probably wont try one ever again for a couple of reasons. First, I am way more about my frogs and their well being than I am about the visual impression of the tank (functionality over wow factor). The other reason is due to my own struggles trying to incorporate water features of any kind into my tanks and resulting trauma it has had on my willingness to try again. I've tried them all: Drip walls, streams, corner ponds, larger bodies of water, combinations of all the above. Not one has been successful long term for me. Or at least not worth the effort to maintain. Now that I think about it, there is a very good chance I use my past failures to rationalize that I don't incorporate water features of any kindfor the safety of my frogs.

Anyways, here is my take on a couple of the questions you posed:

*Can dart frogs easily climb out of the water anywhere (glass, vertical water edge, etc.)*? I don't have experience with thumbnails, but I know that adults for most species may not be able to climb up the glass directly out of a water source. I say this because after I mist, most of my adult frogs cannot climb the slippery glass very well. This is the case with my auratus, tinctorious, terribilis, luecs. They can climb a couple inches and just slide right down.

*Are dart frogs smart enough to remember where a place is to easily climb out of the water (a rock or stick at an incline, for instance)?*
I doubt it. I would expect if they fell in a water feature for their reaction to be more of panic than a calm calculated swim to the easiest exit route. I may be wrong.

*Isn't a paludarium depriving dart frogs of valuable land space?* In some cases it definitely would be, like in a smaller tank. In a larger tank, there may be plenty of land space. But the size tanks most people use to keep their frogs I think would deprive frogs of valuable land space.

*Do you think it matters which species/morph?* I do believe some species would be better suited than others. Some species are associated with streams that have moving water such as some of the Ameerga.

*Would you recommend keeping darts in a paludarium? Does your recommendation depend on how much experience with aquaria/paludaria/dart frog keeping a person has?* I wouldn't recommend it. I think it is more for the keepers enjoyment than the best interest of the frogs. But I'm sure it can be done by an experienced hobbyist in a sufficiently large tank.


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## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

I probably should have defined my terms better  I maybe using the term wrong, but when I think of a paludarium, it means that there is a substantial amount of water that covers a significant amount of the surface area of the bottom of the tank with relatively deep (deep enough to drown a little dart frog) water. Water features have been covered in other threads relatively recently. The problems with them have to do with the difficulties of containing moving water (water falls, drip walls, etc.). An exposed corner of the tank with a little pond hardly counts in my book, though even this can be difficult to maintain long-term. So, let's confine the discussion in this thread to the definition of paludarium that I use above and if anyone else wants to start another thread about water features in general, I am happy to jump over there and talk about those in that thread  

indrap and gonzalez mention the amount of water vs the amount of land space. If you are talking about a relatively large tank with a small number of dart frogs where the paludarium section only occupies a small percentage of the floor space, I think I could get behind that more than some of the tanks I have been seeing lately where the majority of what would have been floor space is covered in deep water. I have a hard time believing that the frogs are as "happy" (loaded term that I don't like to use, but you get the idea) as if they actually had that floor space to hop around on. A 15 foot vivarium could have plenty of both land and water space to maybe have the best of both worlds. That deep water would still make me nervous, though. Anybody with large zoo dart frog exhibit experience have any stories about having to fish live or dead frogs out of a large water feature? TaratulaGuy? Ed? I actually can't recall seeing a dart frog zoo exhibit with deep enough water to have to worry about drowning. 

@HawpScotch - the only tank I have any sort of water feature in is my 90 gallon A. pepperi 'Abiseo' tank. They negotiate my running stream water just fine and do try to breed (still working on fertility...) so I guess it's successful. When the pump goes out on that stream, though, I really, really don't look forward to having to get a new one in there. I have a hatch built in, but I am pretty sure it is going to be tough to open around all of the Anubias roots that are growing over it now. Overall, maybe having a water feature is a good thing for these guys - I am not sure.

@Philsuma - that's kind of what I was getting at. I want to find out if there are people willing to comment that have substantial (multiple years) experience with paludaria (defined above) with dart frogs in them. Has anyone actually experienced a drowning or are these stories just anecdotal?

@varanoid - Thanks for answering my questions!


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## indrap (Aug 28, 2018)

Ah I equated water feature to pauladarium before. A lot of the frogs in the hobby are naturally found next to bodies of water in nature are they not? I guess my thought process is that we're only simulating a tiny fraction of their environment, and we should be doing the most to ensure their safety and longevity in captivity. The risk of drowning seems like it's there but I'd be interested in hearing actual experiences.

I've seen people keep frogs in biopod aquas and what not without incident, I don't think I could do it myself, I'd be too stressed about losing a frog - some of mine definitely leap before they look.


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## Philsuma (Jul 18, 2006)

No, the majority of Dart Frogs are not found near any substantial water.

A large pond is a 'water feature'

A stream is a 'water feature'

A drip wall is a 'water feature'

a small opening in a false bottom or a small depression somewhere in the vivarium where a 'BIT' of water accumulates is something even less/smaller and not a 'water feature'

A paludarium is very substantial and equates to somewhat if not 50/50 land and water.

A riparium is a 'shoreline or a stream' and also probably close to 50/50.

The vernacular is admittedly tough.


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## hp192 (Feb 28, 2016)

I'll answer the original poster's direct questions:

1) I've kept four Azureus in a 55 gallon paludarium for 5 years.

2) I don't think it matters what species you keep, as long as the paludarium is designed correctly. In addiction to my plaudarium, I built a 55 gallon paludarium for a high school 3 years ago. They've kept 2 of my Terribs in it successfully since then.

3) The water is 8 inches deep. I don't think it matters how deep the water is.

4) Fish species matter. My paludarium water is mostly non-moving. I prefer to keep species in tanks with their native flora and fauna, but with the paludarium, I've found that a single male betta is the best inhabitant. 

5) I think the success of the paludarium is dependent on a person's experience with dart frogs AND aquariums. I might be going out on a limb here, but I think success depends on treating a paludarium as both and aquarium AND a vivarium. I know that sounds obvious, but it isn't. I treat the water feature as an aquarium and the land feature as a vivarium. 

I am very aware that my paludarium does not replicate the exact kind of habitat of Azureus. But the frogs have been prolific breeders and have no health problems...the betta has survived longer than any other betta I've had in a number of aquariums.


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## oldlady25715 (Nov 17, 2007)

I’ve had a riparium about 3” deep with the little lily pads for about 1.5 years. The breeding trio of escudo have never been spotted in the water. I put a little shrimp in the water but haven’t seen it since.


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## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

Now we're talkin'! That sounds like some solid experience, hp192. These are great data points because they are both large species. Those types of frogs are who I would be worried are the worst swimmers of all. Have you ever had to pull any of them out of the water? Are they just competent enough to avoid the water entirely? I would think that my terribs would have lunged at a fly at some point, missed, and ended up in the drink  

That's a couple of times now that I have seen "as long as it's designed correctly." Can you expand on that? How would I design a paludarium correctly to avoid having a problem with dart frogs falling in? No overhanging branches? Plenty of places to crawl out of the water? What did you guys have in mind when you mentioned this? 

Have you had any issues in either of the tanks with calcium deposits? I guess it's not too big of a deal because you can always use a razor blade on the glass.

Also, what factors are involved in choosing fish species? How did you end up with a betta being the best option? I assume it's because they are labyrinth breathers? There are other fish that breath off the top, though (gouramis? killis?) so I wondered why the betta ended up being the best option. Gotta be one super "happy" betta in there!

Thanks again for sharing your experience.

Mark



hp192 said:


> I'll answer the original poster's direct questions:
> 
> 1) I've kept four Azureus in a 55 gallon paludarium for 5 years.
> 
> ...


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## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

oldlady25715 said:


> I’ve had a riparium about 3” deep with the little lily pads for about 1.5 years. The breeding trio of escudo have never been spotted in the water. I put a little shrimp in the water but haven’t seen it since.


Nice, oldlady. It's hard to see from the picture, but does the water area take up a bunch of space on the floor of the tank? Do you have branches that overhang the water? Since I am sure the pums climb over every inch of the tank, I would think they would be out over the water all the time. Maybe pums and thumbs are less likely to fall since they could be living higher up in the trees than some of the heavier-bodied frogs? With lily pads in there (a good choice, I would think), maybe even if they fell, they would just fall on the lily pads and hop out without incident. They could also be falling in and are able to crawl out before you see them. Either way sounds pretty safe to me. 

Thanks again!

Mark


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## Philsuma (Jul 18, 2006)

consider that most fails -water deaths are going to go unreported. You are just not going to get people to post and say 'My frogs died'. It was traumatic enough then, and they most likely don't wish to relive it or possibly be judged and commented on.

This is the reason so many people dismiss frog drownings as 'second hand information'. The reality is that at frog meetings, American Frog Day, International Amphibian Day, local meets and fellow hobbyist's houses....is where you are going to hear about the 'bad things' and the fails / deaths. 

Not on FB or an open forum so much, if at all.


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## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

Philsuma said:


> consider that most fails -water deaths are going to go unreported. You are just not going to get people to post and say 'My frogs died'. It was traumatic enough then, and they most likely don't wish to relive it or possibly be judged and commented on.
> 
> This is the reason so many people dismiss frog drownings as 'second hand information'. The reality is that at frog meetings, American Frog Day, International Amphibian Day, local meets and fellow hobbyist's houses....is where you are going to hear about the 'bad things' and the fails / deaths.
> 
> Not on FB or an open forum so much, if at all.


Well, I guess we will just have to hope that somebody is willing to come out of the woodwork and take one for the team! I would agree that there is probably bias in who will report negative results in a forum like this. Keeping the tone positive should increase the odds, though. Truth be told, as you already pointed out, most people with significant experience have abandoned posting in this forum. I judge this by the lack of posting by senior members like you. Most of the posts are generated by relatively new folks (at least to this forum). I still think it's a good source of information though, especially for those of us who have no interest in Facebook. We also have to be willing to acknowledge success stories that don't confirm what we thought we knew, too. Those are valid data points, as would be stories about harm to frogs.

Thanks for contributing, Philsuma! It is nice to have somebody willing to post that has a lot of experience in the hobby.

Mark


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## hp192 (Feb 28, 2016)

Encyclia said:


> Now we're talkin'! That sounds like some solid experience, hp192. These are great data points because they are both large species. Those types of frogs are who I would be worried are the worst swimmers of all. Have you ever had to pull any of them out of the water? Are they just competent enough to avoid the water entirely? I would think that my terribs would have lunged at a fly at some point, missed, and ended up in the drink
> 
> That's a couple of times now that I have seen "as long as it's designed correctly." Can you expand on that? How would I design a paludarium correctly to avoid having a problem with dart frogs falling in? No overhanging branches? Plenty of places to crawl out of the water? What did you guys have in mind when you mentioned this?
> 
> ...



I've never had to pull one out of the water. Yes, they occasionally fall(?) or jump in. They climb back out on the glass or via some plants or sticks that I have leaning in the water specifically for that purpose. I've never had one drown. I've lost frogs to disease in the past, but never one to a water feature. 

With regards to my 'designed correctly' comment, I'm just referring to my own opinion that fast running water or the lack of an object that allows the frog to climb out of the water would probably be detrimental to their survival. I've never built a paludarium with a fast-moving water feature and I've never built a paludarium without providing multiple water exit points for the frogs so my comments are hypothetical. 

I don't have issues with calcium deposits because I only used distilled water.

I put the betta in there because I saw it suffering/dying in a tiny cup in Petco and I felt bad for it. I originally had fish in the paludarium that were native to the Azureus home country but they were picking on the betta so I moved them to another tank. The betta is now thriving. If you treat the water feature like an aquarium, with proper temperature and filtration, I don't think it matters what fish you put in there as long as they're not big enough to eat a frog.


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## Socratic Monologue (Apr 7, 2018)

varanoid said:


> I don't have experience with thumbnails, but I know that adults for most species may not be able to climb up the glass directly out of a water source. I say this because after I mist, most of my adult frogs cannot climb the slippery glass very well. This is the case with my auratus, tinctorious, terribilis, luecs. They can climb a couple inches and just slide right down.


Imitators and vanzolinii climb freshly misted glass easily. I don't know how they would do if that glass were submerged, though.


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## Ravage (Feb 5, 2016)

I have "water features" in several vivaria, and it seems I correctly call them vivariums. They are depressions where the water table is reached and while static, never seem to be stagnant. These tanks contain D. auratus and D. tinctorius. They are really swamps with emmersed A. nana and C. wendtii, and water depth just enough for tadpole deposition.
I just built my first moving water/moist land tank for glass frogs (H. valerioi). It is designed for a current from a small aquarium pump to make a mild flow from one side to the other. - no splashing allowed. The two sides are explicitly separate and the design is like two bottom tanks side by side. Most of the issues I've heard of with land/water vivs is when the water splashes and saturates the substrate- leading to sour "soil". I tried to carefully debug this system so the two bodies of water- "aquarium" and "vivarium" can not join under any circumstance. I consider this a paludarium, but one where two systems visually look like one, but definitely are not.
It is only a few weeks old, so still in the grow in de-bug stage, so far so good.
And it's not a dart frog system but a step towards potentially making one for an appropriate species. Because, face it, it's cool for display. Thanks for this thread. Let's continue to get some more good discussion of how to do this right.


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## chillplants (Jul 14, 2008)

I'm very happy to see this discussion. I have been planning a build in my head and I'm just about ready to begin. I would like 8-10" of water for some fish. The tank would be 24" deep with 14-18" for land and the rest would be exposed water. I'm still debating adding dart frogs and hoping to hear more positive stories.


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## Cakers (Sep 10, 2017)

Thank you for the conversation I'm still learning just a little over two years into pdf's. I grew up in family owned pet store and my experience says the pet owner has the obligation to keep the pets safe. The problem with pauladria is the pdf is not really aquatic. I have fire belly frogs for a several years they love the water and will sit in the pond area a long time with water pump pouring on their head I don't see pdf's doing that. Also perhaps in nature pdf's are near water but most vivs seem too small for them to get away and negotiate around water this is not really matching their natural environment. Why not put reed frog or something like that in pauladria more closely matches type of frog with environment?


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## Encyclia (Aug 23, 2013)

hp192 said:


> I've never had to pull one out of the water. Yes, they occasionally fall(?) or jump in. They climb back out on the glass or via some plants or sticks that I have leaning in the water specifically for that purpose. I've never had one drown. I've lost frogs to disease in the past, but never one to a water feature.


This quote gives me a little bit more peace with the safety aspect of dart in paludaria, but it is still only one data point. If Terribs can swim to the edge and get out, I would think that most darts would be able to. I would have thought that Terribs would sink like a stone 

This is only one data point, though, and no one has weighed in with any horror stories of losing their frogs to drowning. That part of the story is still primarily anecdotal, at least as far as this thread is concerned. 

Still unaddressed is the fact that many of the dart species don't seem to be adapted to living in an area with large amounts of deep water. While they might be able to live in such an environment, the question remains as to whether we are being good stewards by putting them in a paludarium vs. someplace that better mimics their native habitat. Cakers makes some good points about how some other species might be better suited to a paludarium than darts.

I guess this is a broader discussion about what kind of obligation we as owners are under to provide a habitat that is as close to ideal for the frogs as possible. 
I suspect there will be widely varying opinions on all of this! As HawpScotch said, we are all willing to have the frogs in a small (compared to their native habitat) box - are the differences in habitat we are discussing here just splitting hairs compared with that huge compromise? None of the above is rhetorical. I am not even sure where I stand on many of those issues. My "hyper-real" vivarium construction tendencies that I talk about above automatically rule out any genuine effort to perfectly mimic my frog's native habitats. Heck, I couldn't even tell you which frogs in my living room natively live in higher temps vs. lower temps. They are all exposed to whatever the room is doing at the time. I clearly am willing to make some compromises (vs. native conditions) in how I keep my frogs.

Mark


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## Pubfiction (Feb 3, 2013)

IME and from all the vivariums I have seen at frog meetings and so on, dart frogs are not particularly bothered by water and they are better swimmers than people think. Some people say that every animal that lives in the rainforest can swim, and it is necessary by how often and violently the areas flood. This is especially true of the Amazon basin, large parts of which are dart frog territory. To a frog a heavy rain can create an amount of water that is essentially in perceivably different than a river for a short time. 
In my auratus tank I watched an auratus go under water because it was trying to escape me and refuse to come up for air. So I timed, it, it stayed under for a full 4 minutes before it decided to surface. 

The same is true for water quality, dart frogs live a life around tiny bodies of water that must get very fouled. You are talking about puddles on forest floors or a crevice in a true with feces, dead insects, leaves and everything else. Then it rains and suddenly that water becomes almost like distilled water. basically dart frogs have a high tolerance to water variations, it is necessary due to their environment. 


I have seen large paludariums with bodies of waters or even slow moving rivers and pumps with flourishing populations of dart frogs. 

I think the larger problem gets to be when people try to cram all of it into a smaller vivarium and dont think about floor space. Any area you use for water has to be subtracted from the usable space for the frogs. If frogs dont have enough space and they get aggressive then you will find frogs that were bullied into the water and died. 

Usable space has to be thought about both qualitatively and quantitatively.


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## salvz (Nov 3, 2014)

I don't now but have set up several paludariums over the last 20 years, some with moving water some not, some with tinc-sized animals and many more with thumbnails. I've kept the water fairly shallow (< 4 inches) and always used a false bottom and/or an airy hydroponic/inert substrate that does not sour. I always tried to ramp the shoreline, add emergent plants, or otherwise make for easy egress. I've always tried to keep a generous land area, esp for the larger darts. This has always worked for me and I've never had a death or had to remove a trapped frog. Just my experience. BTW, I've never seen a dart in the wild in a stream or water but lots of imitators, for example, along vegetation adjacent (within feet or a few meters) to small streams before.


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