u/Ryogathelost

The Cuban Treefrog is one of the most hated animals in the world, especially by nature enthusiasts, which I've always felt was odd and sad. You will find there is a great defecit of information out there about them that doesn't have to do with identifying and killing them. People do keep them, but it's uncommon and too little enthusiasm is given too them.

Meet Monkey. She is a 6 month old Cuban from Central Florida. She was caught as a tadpole to save her from a kiddie pool that was drying out. She survived roughly 20 siblings due mostly to how difficult it was to recreate the properties of the water they spawned in and acclimate them to clean water. The unintended consequence is she's a rather durable and tolerant specimen among her kind.

Monkey gets her name from the monkey bar trick she pulled off in her first enclosure, which is in one of the photos. She's currently roughly thumb sized. We suspect she is a girl from her ear size among other frogs the same size, but frankly it is a little too early to tell.

She was raised on fruit flies and now eats small crickets and roaches. She hates black soldier fly larva and doesn't appear to be able to digest them well, often just passing them whole. When she poops, she will often catapult it off her butt and halfway across the tank with her back foot.

Her skin changes a pretty wide spectrum of colors. From what I can tell, it's possibly based more on humidity than other factors - darker when it's wetter - but I don't want to stress her out to test the hypothesis. She's normally darker, but you'll see a lot of photos where her skin is lighter. She does not seem physically capable of turning bright green.

Monkey is fairly intelligent. She is aware her food comes from the sky human on the other side of the glass, and each night when she's ready for dinner she will sit somewhere visible out in the open. She will eventually start getting closer to the glass and staring at you if you wait too long to feed her.

She is also aware that giant hands come down and fiddle with the waterfall and plants, and she is completely unaffected by them and will stay put whenever it happens, even if her favorite neon pothos is being adjusted. She is not handled at all unless it's completely necessary, since it does visibly stress her out. Always use gloves to handle amphibians.

Monkey lives in a 30-gallon horizontal bioactive paludarium with several varieties of pothos, hoya, and moss. The forest floor is built on a PVC, egg crate, and foam platform over a hidden reservoir filled with a lava stone bio filter and air stones. A waterfall circulates the water from the reservoir at one end of the tank, down a long waterfall to a very small pond at the other end, which passes through a screen to the reservoir to pass through the bio filter and airstones again.

She likes 75% humidity and about 80 degrees F, and she likes wet, dead leaf litter so the dirt doesn't stick to her, which is the one thing I've seen that seems to make her upset. She's very patient when she hunts, but she's clumsy - often losing prey from calculating jumps poorly, but it doesn't seem to discourage her.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to meet my girl. I tried to include a good step-by-step going back to when she was a tadpole. Have a great weekend everybody!

GTA 5