Feeding your Dendrobates leucomelas

The Dendrobates leucomelas is an insectivorous animal. Their diet consists of strictly live bugs. Good nutrition is a crucial part of animal husbandry

How much does the Dendrobates leucomelas need?

Juvenile– feed as often as possible, 20-30 fruitflies per feeding.

Young Adult– feed daily 50-75 flies per day.

Adults– once established and feeding well with a fat bellies you can leave them occasionally for several days without worry of them needing to be fed. Feed daily as much as they can eat in 15 mins.

What insects to feed the Dendrobates leucomelas?

The primary diet of the Dendrobates leucomelas should be flightless fruit flies. As the fruit flies are tiny food items, the leucomelas needs to eat a lot of them. There are two ways to get your leucomelas’ nutrients: 1) through a varied diet and 2) through vitamin supplementation.

flightless fruit flies – due to the Dendrobates leucomelas size they can eat both Melanogaster and Hydei fruit flies. Melanogaster are the smaller of the two varieties.
pinhead crickets – make sure they are less than a week old so they are very tiny. Do not feed any that are too large or too many as they will continue to grow to full size within the tank and will then need to be manually removed from the tank.
springtails – they are tasty snacks and double as a janitor for the tank. These will help keep the leucomelas forage through the leaf litter for food similar to how they would in the wild.
isopods – similar to the springtails they are tasty snacks and double as a janitor for the tank.
wax worms – these are very high in fat and should be fed sparingly. The larger frogs will love these, but half-grown wax worms may be required for smaller species as they get rather large.
phoenix worms -Josh’s frogs sells some phoenix worms that are 3/16″ long. These would be perfect for the Dendrobates Leucomelas. They are low in fat and high in calcium so you will not need to dust or gut load them.

Supplementation

Fruit flies on their own are a poor nutritional source so they should be dusted in a high quality vitamin supplement. Do not overdose the vitamins as Vitamin A in high doses is fatal.

Daily- Dust the prey with some Repashy Calcium Plus.

Monthly – Dust prey with Repashy Vitamin A plus.

Ultimate Dendrobates leucomelas Care Guide:

This care guide contains affiliate links, which means that thefroglady.wordpress.com gets a small commission from the Amazon products that our readers buy through us. It does not cost you any extra and the proceeds go toward keeping thefroglady.wordpress.com free. Thank you for your support!

Is this information out of date?

Thefroglady.wordpress.com’s goal is to provide credible and up to date information for amphibian keepers of all stages. We try our best to keep up with recommended care as it is released but sometimes we miss some items. If you have found something that is out of date, please contact us here so we can fix it. Thanks!