Culturing Aphids as Feeder Insects

Today, we'll be taking a look at how to culture pea aphids as feeder insects. They make great feeders for dart frogs and other small animals, and they are actually quite easy to breed.
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• IN DEPTH Poison Dart F...
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Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:28 The life cycle of aphids
01:33 Culturing pea aphids
05:04 Lighting
05:55 Schedule for growing pea plants
07:31 Acquiring the aphids
08:15 Feeding the frogs
09:41 Using wild aphids as feeders
10:22 Outro
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Music:
Lakey Inspired - Distant
Lakey Inspired - Better Days
Dosi & Aisake - Cruising [NCS Release]
Lakey Inspired - Days Like These
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Full credit for the NCS song
Track: Dosi & Aisake - Cruising [NCS Release]
Music provided by NoCopyrightSounds.
Watch: ncs.lnk.to/CruisingAT/youtube
Free Download / Stream: ncs.io/Cruising
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Photo credit for the aphid closeup (used on the right side in the thumbnail):
Shipher Wu (photograph) and Gee-way Lin (aphid provision), National Taiwan University - PLoS Biology, February 2010 - CC BY 2.5

[@Tropical_Tutorials]

Thank you for watching this video!
Pea aphids are somewhat common within the European hobby (many dart frog breeders here have cultured them for a long time, and they can be ordered through several websites selling vivarium related products), but it seems like almost nobody in the US keeps or sells them for some reason. After sharing this video in an international facebook group, I got a lot of comments asking where you can buy these in the states, and I simply have no idea. This is a bit unfortunate, but that might be something that could change in the future. If you find some US website that sells them, please let me know so I can update this comment.
Who knows, maybe you could have success catching some pea aphids from your garden and successfully culturing them inside? If you try this, please share your experiences here in the comments so we can all learn a thing or two :)

[@xBUSYWORKSx]

best dart frog videos on RUclips

[@Goldgazzelle]

oh my garden will be a good source of summer food in this case lmao

[@alexandrajones7]

awesome video keep it up

[@zacthacker3634]

Very interesting! Great video!

[@michaelmelo8075]

I have been very curious about culturing aphids ever since I learned that they could be an alternative food source. Your video was great you answered pretty much all my questions. The only thing that I'm not sure is could I just aphids off pea plants in my garden and start cultures form there? TIA

[@Tropical_Tutorials]

If you can find some, I’d definitely give it a shot

[@kyote1369]

What is the benefit of aphids over springtails?

[@Tropical_Tutorials]

I wouldn't claim that they are better (or worse) feeders than springtails, but springtails are great because they serve an additional purpose (cleaning) besides being food. I would definitely not skip the springtails in favor of aphids (though I currently don't have a springtail culture outside of my vivarium, I only have plenty of them in my vivariums). However, I think you'll probably get a higher mass of feeder insects from an aphid culture than a springtail culture (unless you have a BUNCH of springtails) so you can feed more frogs with them. In this video, I just thought comparing them to fruit flies was more relevant (since I use fruit flies as the base food source), and the thumbnail text "The best feeder insects?" (if you got that thumbnail, there are multiple thumbnails for this video) is mainly just to spark interest

[@kyote1369]

@@Tropical_Tutorials Thank you for the info 😁 Great video btw 👍