Reef HQ Aquarium has been building a rainforest display for the last few months and it has reached the stage at which animals are introduced. This one surprised me:
The Green Tree Frog, Litoria caerulea, is very common around Townsville – indeed, all the wetter parts of Queensland – and it usually merits its common name. Here, for instance, is one in my garden:
The Wikipedia article does say, ‘Its color depends on the temperature and colour of the environment, ranging from brown to green,’ and we often see examples with a dull olive-green coloration but the one in Reef HQ in a (so far) black and grey-brown setting is the most extreme I have seen.
More information: frogs.org.au. The home page will take you to all sorts of useful or fun stuff about frogs.
A very red one (not my photo) is here.
Hi there,
I have inherited a tree frog very much like the dark olive/green one pictured above.
He’s eating crickets and earthworms.
His poos were raisin sized when I got him and are now huge! Three or four times the size. Am I overfeeding him? Could he be stressed?
The tank came with no humidity gauge or temp guage. I’ve just been leaving the heating pads on constantly and spraying his tank twice a day. I also added a shallow pool.
What tips would you give me to make him a happy wee frog?
Also he was found in a bunch of flowers about a decade ago.
Thanks
Hi, Aimee,
I’m no expert on keeping them but I can confirm that Green Tree Frogs do deposit surprisingly large droppings when they’re well fed. We had one living on a compost bin and its droppings were larger than peanut size. They were full of the crackly bits of cockroaches, which always live in the bin – not that I normally go around examining animal poo, but I checked these out because they were so big I thought they might be possum droppings but they ‘looked sort of wrong’ (not very technical, I know!).
As for heat and humidity, all I can say is that they don’t need to be constantly wet but they do like humidity. There’s a care sheet at http://frogs.org.au/x/media/cs-caerulea.pdf and the links at http://frogs.org.au/launchpad/index.html may also be useful.
Good luck!
I have a new record-holder for the title of darkest green tree frog. It’s actually a White-lipped Tree Frog but usually green, too. See it on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10156560162112083&set=p.10156560162112083&type=3&theater