If your question is regarding the "poison" part of the name. As far as I know that only applies to the ones which are wild caught. Captive bred have lost this feature. Apparently the poison comes from certain insects that they consume in the wild that they do not get in captivity.

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Merlin,
What's Life Without A Little Magic!

Thanks for the info,I do believe my pet shop has that book, I'll check it out. I know phoenix worms are very good, my wife fed them to her very little fire-bellied toad and he got bigger quick.

Nothing, they aren't poisonous in captivity. Their staple diet needs to be flightless fruit flies. Pinheads are good, but not as a staple. Springtails aren't necessary because he is a larger frog. With my experience my frogs won't eat Phoenix worms or any worm at that.

Possibly no one here really knows, but why does the staple have to be FFF?

I would have to disagree, fruit flies do not have to be the staple diet but are better than crickets. Higher protein content and low fat, soft exoskeleton etc.

They are also the perfect small size that will not get too big (Drosophila melanogaster). They are also extremelly easy to breed with minimal space and effort.

As for touching a poison dart frog... nothing will happen to you...even in the wild. It has to enter the blood stream or be ingested to take effect. I am living proof lol... touched many in the wild and have even eaten fruit after handeling a couple by accident without washing my hands... no effect.

Dendrobates fed on a diet of insects without alkaloids will lose their toxicity, they usually get these from ants they would eat in the wild. They then absorb and seperate the alkaloids from the ants into their skin.

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On touching, captive frogs, it is true they have no poison. Even wild dendrobates do not have toxic enough secretions to harm a human significantly (mild numbing on skin contact is about the worst of it). The name "poison Dart Frog" is a bit of a misnomer, as only one or two of them actually have strong enough poison to do any real damage to a human (or other animals for that matter). The genus Phyllobates contains only one species: the golden poison frog, which is considered to be the most toxic vertebrate in the world. They are not uncommon (as dart frogs go) in the pet trade. You'll certainly see azureus more often, but it isn't unheard of for people to keep a Phyllobates terribilis either.

An interesting bit of trivia about D. tinctorius: they are often referred to as the dying poison dart frog because the natives like to rub them on the backs of young parrots, and the feathers will then grow in different colors. I'm not sure how or why that works.

That's a cool bit of trivia.

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~~Steph

"This I believe: That the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world." John Steinbeck