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SpyderFemme · 07-28-2012, 03:56 PM

azureus egg cleaved late and hatched early! Is this a temp thing?
There is one more egg to hatch...already lost 3 Sad

***joneill809*** · 07-28-2012, 11:31 PM

Congratulations! I'm a newb and my first darts (azureus!) have begun breeding. Figured I'd give you some dates and counts from the first two clutches my pair produced for comparison.

They produced a clutch on 7/14 of 5 eggs in a bromeliad (tight squeeze), 4 of which were developing for the first 9 days. On 7/23 they began producing a second clutch of 6 eggs in a petri dish in a cave toward the back of the viv...the inexperienced male kept going back to the bromeliad (my guess was he was attempting to fertilize the original clutch again instead of the new one). He ended up displacing the eggs so I removed the first clutch, but 3 of the remaining 4 stopped developing. It's 7/28 and my single egg from 7/14 continues to develop, but it has not hatched. The second clutch currently only has two eggs developing, though they seem to be coming along slower than the first clutch.

Room temp is 78 during the day, 76 at night.

Hope this helps - sorry I can't be of more help - this is all new to me. I've been posting pictures of the remaining egg's development on another thread FWIW. Good luck!

***Philsuma*** · 07-29-2012, 12:54 AM

^^ Good Temps....try to keep steady and no 4-5 or more degree swings either up or down.

Keep moist - water to the edge of the eggs but never covering. Use 'regular' water and never R.O / Reverse osmosis or Distilled (will kill the embryo).

DianeCarter · 07-29-2012, 01:48 AM

Phil--Why would RO or distilled water be harmful to the embryo? We use it to mist, I would think it would be preferred?

***joneill809*** · 07-29-2012, 02:57 AM

I'm no expert, but I have looked into this lately and I found this thread on water to be an interesting read:
http://dartden.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=...led#p21611

I pulled a few posts that I found helpful:

Philsuma Wrote:IMO:

Distilled water is fine for misting and plant spraying. You just don't want to use it for eggs or tadpoles all by itself. Many people apply commercially available aquarium additives to RO or distilled water. RO and Distilled water is very "pure" and as such, will seek to "pull in" elements and this results in leaching needed chemicals ect from your frog egg or tadpole - depriving it and often causing death.

A simplistic "safe" answer to new hobbyists, is grocery store bottled "Spring Water" for almost everything. If you are comfortable using a good quality human grade water filter for your tap water - then that's about the same level of precaution in my book.

Once you are in the hobby for a while you may embark on a quest to have a friend who works at a water laboratory, test and recommend water for you, but until then....the quick, easy and safest method (if you are scared of your Tap water) is to use the grocery store spring water.

There is NO expert opinion on water or anything else in the Dart Frog hobby. There are no "expert hobbyists" here either IMO, so you can't rely on anyone to say: "The water you should use is ___ ". Just take some time and read the Water subforum here. There are at least 4 other threads that I see / know of that also have good information on your questions above. Above all, don't ever be afraid to post.....questions, or anything else. We are here to help.

Most agree that distilled / RO is not good for tad water, but there are a variety of methods for tad water solutions. I thought this was a good summary (though there are other methods):

Cindy Dicken Wrote:We use bottled springwater (Ozarka) to raise tadpoles in.
We use RO or distilled in our misting system.
We use treated tap water to top off the water features. We treat our tap water with Prime, it will remove chlorine as well as chloramine.
I think if you took a sample of rain water and had it analyzed it would scare the hell out of you.
For those that are curious about rainwater, you might find this link of interest.
http://nadp.sws.uiuc.edu/

Well I responded without any factual knowledge from me! Big Grin