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Hello, I just found this thread, please forgive me for replying to months-old posts. I have dabbled in several weird hobbies, I will post about them for you. Slugworth posted:I accidentally became a mounted insect guy. My wife has dabbled. Mostly I used to just buy her pre-mounted insects, and then a guy we know gave her some more. One issue we've had over the years is that small bugs get into the display frames and eat the corpses of the bigger bugs. We've lost several specimens that way. Especially with your naturalistically-mounted beetles - which are gorgeous by the way - you may want to research how to try and prevent that. I'm pretty sure one of our losses was to carpet beetles, because we had a brief interlude of carpet beetles in our home (we own no carpets but they were probably subsisting on shedded cat fur and definitely on my wife's wool garments) but I'm not certain of that. Shells: a year and a half ago my wife and I collected a bunch of shells on a beach near Pensacola. Here they are:  A couple of close-ups of the more interesting ones:    I would not mind some identifications! My hobbies: For about 15 years we have kept poison dart frogs. We used to have a lot more, but the way it goes is you gradually have fewer and fewer unless you keep buying more, and we stopped doing that. So here's the last one:   She's a Dendrobates leucomelas, or bumble-bee dart frog. In the past we also had Phyllobates bicolor, Ranitomeya variabilis, and - for a tragically very short period of time - D. tinctorius. We were extremely careful to only buy frogs from breeders who we met in person, trafficking in wild-caught dart frogs is unethical and sometimes also illegal so don't do that. Here's a pic of our bicolor from 2009:  I also collected AOL CDs. Back in the 90s AOL sent CDs to everyone, they'd show up in the mail, they'd be inserted in newspapers and stuck to magazines, etc. I didn't actually like or want them but I was poor as poo poo and thought maybe collectors would eventually want them so I grabbed a few and then members of my family started saving them for me. So now I have a duffel bag of AOL CDs in the closet.  The oldest is an actual floppy disk  I always liked how the primary selling point was how many hours you'd get for free. For the first month, or eventually, the first 45 days. For you younger folks, that's right, you used to have to pay for dialup internet by the hour used per month, at least if you went with AOL, and you did that for a long, long, long time after every other ISP was offering a flat monthly rate with unlimited connection hours. The number of hours kept slowly going up, because you know, you gotta beat whatever the old offer was, right?  And then I've got a few of these random novelty biggo shaped shits like this one  Anyway when I was in my 20s I hoped I'd make a few hundred dollars eventually on whichever ones turned out to be rare and collectible. A quick glance at eBay suggests a few other people had the same idea, and maybe there's not very many people out there really trying to complete their collection by actually buying the things. But poo poo, it's a really compact collection so it costs me nothing really to hang on to them! e. lmao people do actually buy these if those aren't fake sales to create the illusion of a market. Huh. Leperflesh has a new favorite as of 00:21 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 5, 2024 23:51
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mycatscrimes posted:If they are captive bred they don't have any poison! I think it's because their poison comes from their diet, like fugu fish. This is exactly correct: the dart frogs manufacture batrachotoxin from some portion of their natural diet, which some scientists have speculated are mites or ants but nobody has actually proven what food items they might be from for sure. Also, of over 100 species of poison dart frogs in the superfamily Dendrobatoidea, only about four are documented as having been used by local cultures for making poison darts: all of them are in the genus Phyllobates, and that bicolor we had was one of those species. Most or all poison dart frogs have at least mildly toxic skin in the wild, and concentrations of the toxic chemical vary among individuals as well as species, but the Phyllobates spp are the ones with the super high concentrations that'll kill ya for sure. Even wild-caught frogs gradually lose their toxicity, but it can take years, and no poison dart frog is safe to lick. You also generally do not handle these extremely fragile creatures, they're not the kind of pet that you pick up and uh, pet. They're for looking at only! Most of the species that appear in the pet trade are the highly colorful ones, and these species with their bright warning colors also tend to be quite bold, so you get to look at them doing their thing. They're active and voracious hunters that eat live prey. The smaller ones you feed live flightless fruit flies, the larger ones can also eat pinhead (< 1 week old) crickets, and some keepers supplement with other small insect foods. They all require at least some degree of climate control, mostly to do with humidity, and they must have extremely clean water. But most of them live in relatively temperate climate - often high up in mountainous rainforest that does not reach the high temps of the lower elevation tropical jungle, and that means they don't need tropical level heating. They also do not get much sunlight naturally and so don't require UV lighting, although many of us use a low level of UV lighting in part to help their plants stay healthy and grow, and also because they may actually manufacture vitamin D at least a little bit. But we dust the food items with a mix of calcium and vitamin powder that contains vitamin D, because they definitely get most of their D from their food in the wild, and fruit flies do not have enough by themselves. The frogs are not very well studied IMO. The whole superfamily's genetic makeup has been surveyed within the last decade and a major taxonomic shakeup occurred, but on an individual species basis there is not much reliable scientific data about things like individual diet or skin toxicity. So everything I said above comes mostly from information shared by enthusiasts and breeders in the pet dart frog keeping world, and should be taken as reasonably true but not 100% verified by thorough scientific investigation. As for the plants: I'm not sure what that vine is. We used to attend a regular frog meetup down in San Jose and the guy that hosted it was also into plants, people would bring cuttings to trade and all the plant names kinda go in one of my ears and out the other. My wife might could say. They're basically immortal viny little plants that do well in the terrarium with 4x daily misting, UV light, practically no soil, and regular trimming. I don't have one right now but these frogs also really love bromeliads, which gather water in their axils that the frogs like to use for laying eggs in. This bumblebee frog is kind of the last survivor, they do well in small groups and she lost her sibling over a year ago to... well, I don't really know. This is part of why I'm easing my way out of the hobby. Frogs are fragile, prone to numerous ailments, they sometimes hide that they're sick at all, and even exotic pet veterinarians don't know what to do for a lot of things. They can live for 20+ years, clearly, but usually don't, and it's unlikely they live for very many years in the wild. The frog way of life is to be prolific rather than robust. So when this one finally kicks the little froggy bucket we don't intend to replace it. We've got a house full of cats now, we have geckos and a toad, and maintaining fruit fly cultures to feed just one frog is a big pain in the rear end. HelloIAmYourHeart posted:These are a murex of some kind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murex Leperflesh has a new favorite as of 02:43 on Apr 6, 2024 |
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Apr 6, 2024 02:40
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mycatscrimes posted:Tentatively, it might be Pellonia repens or a relative? I think that's a closer fit than any pilea or peperomia I've searched, especially since the light interior with a dark frame is a really distinct pattern. Wow OK yeah that might be it, I'll have to go in and see what's thriving right now and see if I can get better photos. The photo I posted was from about two years ago and the vivarium evolves over time. Slugworth posted:So it's tough to like, explain which shells I'm referring to Awesome! I'll dig out the shells and get some labels put together or something, that'd be nice to have. Thank you!
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Apr 8, 2024 04:42
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