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Rainforest Station is gearing up for fall, and building our inventory of exotic pets. Beautifully colored corn snake hatchlings are starting to come in, and many of our leopard gecko babies are ready for new homes. We are expanding our variety of poison dart frogs, and currently have a couple of nice Dendrobates terribilis froglets available. We also have Madagascar giant day geckos and William’s dwarf geckos. Keep an eye out for new additions coming soon.

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Rainforest Station always offers a wide variety of exotic pets, featuring the largest selection of poison dart frogs, tree frogs and terrestrial frogs you’ll find in a retail store in the Midwest. You’ll also find leopard geckos, crested geckos, gargoyle geckos, and other gecko species; bearded dragons and other lizards (currently featuring baby savannah monitors, baby blue-tongued skinks, Asian water dragons, green and red iguanas, ameivas and more ), turtles and tortoises, corn snakes and ball pythons, an assortment of tarantulas, and even some amphibians with tails: tiger salamanders, spotted salamanders, Spanish (Iberia) ribbed newts, California newts, and Axolotl larvae.

If you’re into tarantulas, we have everything from beginner species, such as the Chilean Red Rose-Hair to advanced species such as the Sri Lanka Ornamental Tarantula.

If you are looking for any other species, please drop us a line and we’ll do our best to track it down. And, of course, we have more roaches, crickets, wax worms, fruit flies, and bean beetles than you can shake a stick at.

We also carry a full line of products from manufacturers such as, Exo Terra, Zoo Med, Zilla, Flukers, Tetra, as well as an indoor greenhouse with a wide variety of tropical plants to furnish your naturalistic terrariums and vivariums.

You can shop on-line or stop by and see us. We’re just a mile east of the I-96 interchange, at 6248 28th St. SE, Grand Rapids, Michigan 49546. Or, we offer free delivery of items purchased on-line to any of the shows at which we are a vendor.

Click the Button to go to the On-line Store

These Gorgeous Cobalt Blue Tincs won’t last long!

THE STORE IS FINALLY OPEN!!!!!.

We still have a few things coming in, but we opened the doors Monday, September 15.

We have a great selection of Exo Terra products, including the new 36-inch terrariums; live tropical plants including bromeliads, orchids, and tilandsias (some in bloom); lots of dart frogs ranging from Dendrobates azureus to Phyllobates aurotaenia; and everything else you might need to build a terrarium or vivarium. Heck, we’ll even build one for you!

To celebrate this milestone, for a limited time we are offering a 20% discount off list price on all Exo Terra terrariums!

 Please stop by: 6248 28th St. SE, in Grand Rapids. It’s about a mile east of the I-96/28th St. interchange. We’re open 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, and until 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday.

Happy Frogging,

Jim and Marcia

WHEW!!! After an entire weekend of combing through the PHP script and updating all the links (heck, I didn’t even know what a relational link was until I had to fix this problem!) I think I’ve solved our security certificate problem with the on-line store. 

But, if you’ve already bookmarked the storefront, you’ll have to change the URL to stop getting the error.  Just click on the On-Line Store button at the top of this post, and it will give take the correct route to the store to avoid the error, and then re-bookmark it.

We are gearing up for fall with a couple new offerings that we will be talking more about in the next couple weeks, so keep an eye on the news page.  We’ve also added the Lansing Reptile and Exotic Animal Show to our schedule, Saturday, May 24, so if you’re in the area, please stop by to say “Hi.”

Happy Frogging,

Jim and Marcia 

Well, we’ve learned more about PHP scripting than we ever wanted to know, but we finally got the on-line store up and running.

The site is on an SSL server, but it is a shared SSL certificate belonging to our ISP, so you may get a certificate error when you sign on.  Don’t worry, it’s secure.  We are working with our ISP to get our own SSL certificate in the near future.

We decided not to wait until we had all of our products on the site before going live, so keep an eye out as we add to our catalog of high-quality amphibian merchandise.

 We also have a few “tweaks” needed to completely customize the store, and will work on those as we progress.  If you notice any problems with the site, please let us know on our contact page.  Even if you don’t notice problems, please feel free to let us know how you like it.

We look forward to using this new tool to more efficiently serve our customers, and look forward to hearing from you,.

Happy frogging,

Jim and Marcia

The Online Store is up and running! 

New for the West Michigan Reptile Expo April 13 in Grand Rapids, and the Kalamazoo Reptile Show April 19, we have beautiful captive-bred poison dart frogs!

Stunningly colored, and beautifully patterned, these juvenile frogs are the perfect inhabitants in your naturalistic terrarium.  And, like all captive bred dart frogs (and long term captive wild-caught specimens) they are not even toxic.

We will have striking Dendrobates auratus Panamanian Green & Bronze morphs.  These guys start out looking like standard Green & Black frogs, but as they reach maturity, the black fades to a metallic bronze brown.  The green on these little guys ranges from bright lime to a metallic color I last saw on a 2008 Ford Mustang!

Then there are one of my all-time personal favorites, Cryptophyllobates azureiventris, the Sky Blue Poison Dart Frog.  The belly and legs on these diminuitive little guys is a beautiful sky blue with black reticulations.  The juveniles have orange/yellow dorso-lateral stripes that, if they follow their parents’ coloration, will change to bright lemon yellow as they mature.

From one tiny geographic location in the Andes mountains of Peru, C. azureiventris is the only species in its genus (although it, along with the entire dart frog family is the process of being reclassified), and is one of the rarest dart frogs in the pet hobby.

Last, but certainly not least, is the Big Kahuna of the dart frog hobby, Dendrobates azureus (O.K., so the new nomenclature argues it should be D. tinctorius, but more on that later*).

D. azureus has been a perennial favorite in the hobby, even though it wasn’t officially described until 1981. A number of factors have led to its popularity, certainly not the least of which is the absolutely striking coloration of this frog.  Our juvenile azureus frogs are F-1 generation and an absolutely stunning royal blue with black reticulations.

Another factor leading to their popularity is the outgoing nature of azureus.  Some dart frogs tend toward the shy end of the spectrum, but azureus isn’t one of them.  As soon as I walk in the frog room, these guys start hopping over to the front of the tank looking for food.

And, man can they eat!  These frogs will also get fairly large by dart frog standards, and can put away a lot of fruit flies.

Luckily, we are also ramping up our fruit fly production, and will have plenty of D. melanogaster and D. Hydei cultures available.  We’ll even have culturing kits with our own fruit fly media that makes culturing your own flies inexpensive.

*O.K., I promised to explain the whole azureus/tinctorius thing.  In a nutshell, D. azureus lives in the wild in only one small patch of Suriname rainforest that is surrounded by dry, impassible (at least for a frog) savannah. Surrounding this savannah is more rain forest that is the home to the incredibly variable Dendrobates tinctorius species and its myriad color morphs.  While azureus had originally been classified as a separate species, recent research seems to indicate that it really is just a separate color morph of tinctorius, which was separated from the rest of the species around the time of the last ice age. This separation provided for the development of a very distict coloration, but not enough time for the actual genetic changes of speciation.  Make sense?

Wait until I get into the rest of the new dart frog scientific nomenclature debate.

And I was just getting to the point where I could recognize (and pronounce) the old names!

See you at the show, and if you have any questions, be sure to contact us.

p.s., we are also getting very close to launching our on-line store, which will accept payment via credit cards through paypal!  Whooooo HOoooo!