Hey, i got a 18inL × 18inW 36½inH front open, with screen top enclosure and im trying to figure out the best display animal to put in it, i wanted something rare, exotic, colorful, with personality, i was leaning toward a emerald swift, maybe 2 or a nice size colony of dart frogs but im open for suggestions, please no venomous. I know with any animal hiding is key for survival so im not desperate to see but when it comes out i want people to stop and look
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I think you would have better luck with a colony of dart frogs rather than just 1 emerald swift (2 would not work with that enclosure size). Honestly I don’t think that enclosure would be able to contain an adult Emerald Swift healthily.
You’ll have a higher chance of seeing the dart frogs. Just make sure that the dart frog species you add are compatible!
With that being said I’d say maybe 3-4 dart frogs would do well with that enclosure. Any more than that would be overcrowding the enclosure and might cause stress.
Be sure to do your research on the species if you haven’t already and have the enclosure ready long before you add the frogs.
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It looks like you’re recommending housing more than one species of dart in an enclosure. Darts should be housed only with other darts of their own species, morph and line, and of course with no other vertebrate animals.
As for how many to house together, this is generally not an issue of enclosure size/crowding so much as it is territoriality of the species being housed. Most darts do best long term only in 1.1 pairs in off the shelf sized vivs (which this one is). Also, a vivarium of those dimensions is not suitable for all dart species, and many of the species it is most suitable for are both somewhat challenging to care for and not reliably bold and not group tolerant.
If a person wants to keep darts, by all means plan for a lot (many months) of immersive research of experienced keepers’ knowledge (not by Googling for info, that’s for certain) and go for it. But as for an option for dealing with empty viv syndrome they’re not a great option.
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Well there you go, thats why thorough research should be done 
I was under the impression that similar species could be kept together as long as they had an appropriate setup and no males were involved for cross-breeding.
But if not then thats fine.
I was also under the impression that smaller species of Darts could be housed with certain types, like Mourning Geckos, for example. Is this not true?
‘Appropriate setup’ differs per species, at least a little and at least ideally. That may be a minor point for many species, but providing appropriate hardscape (smaller textured and more vertical for thumbnails, and larger textured and much more horizontal for tinctorius and those species that use habitat similarly) is an underappreciated part of good care.
Finding all females is not really practical. Darts are reliably sexed by calling (males) or egg laying (females), and rounding up a handful of egg laying darts would be challenging (probably more challenging than just setting up a second viv for a second species, anyway). But in at least some species the females are as territorial as males, and in some (tinctorius, possibly leucomelas) the females are often the more problematic sex in this regard.
An important reason not to cohab species is pathogen transfer. Episode #195 of Amphibicast has a good discussion with Brad Wilson DVM on this topic, where he talks about stress and mixing species as the trigger for many pathogen outbreaks (which in darts are often not practically treatable – they’re not like snakes where you can just bring them to the vet and get a diagnosis). Episode #128 has some similarly relevant discussion that’s more about specific pathogens and their prevalence in captive frogs with Robert Ossiboff DVM.
I’m never sure what ‘could be housed with’ means. If it means 'if they’re cohabbed they won’t die right away from cohabbing, at least not obviously), that’s true I guess.
But some reasons not to cohab MGs (for example) with darts are the pathogen risk as mentioned. There’s also the little known fact that MGs prefer a body temp in the low 80s (source), which calls for cryptic basking areas of slightly higher than that (say 85F). When MGs are kept at those preferred temps, they’re pretty scrappy (which relates back to the ‘stress’ comment above), so those basking areas should be large. That’s approaching the dangerous temp zone for darts, and maybe one in a thousand dart vivs has any extra area to be taken up by dangerously unusable space for some other species.
As basking thermoregulators, a case could be made that they ideally be provided with UVB. UVB for darts is a pretty high-level husbandry technique when used appropriately, and inappropriate use does kill darts (usually through excessive hiding and failure to feed, in the cases that I’ve helped troubleshoot online). And yes, I do use metered and goal-directed UVB on some of my darts and some of my other herps.
MG-proofiing a dart viv is problematic too. On ExoTerras, MGs can easily slip out of the door perimeters, and out of the front low vent. Sealing the doors is doable but challenging, and sealing the front vent is also doable but restricts ventilation quite a bit (darts should be provided a good amount of ventilation to offset the misting that itself is very often inadequate).
I really think that we (as a hobby) mistreat MGs as a rule, just like red eared sliders and green iguanas used to be mistreated. Consider that every single one is a breeding animal (not like ball pythons, say, where most of them are just kept as pets and never bred) – we should be knee deep in MGs by now, but the captive population is seemingly basically stable. That means all the offspring produced (eight or ten a year per gecko, maybe?) die except the one that replaces the mother; for every MG you see, ten a year die. If that were the situation with ball pythons, I don’t think we’d tolerate it, but somehow the little herps don’t get as much consideration.
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