I was born in Tilburg, The Netherlands, lived most of my youth in Loon op Zand ( near the Efteling, were frogs come to life in the 25 year old fairytale of the indian waterlillies ) and grew a interest in frogs during that time. In that region it was not difficult to find them and place them in the pond of our home, unfortunately my parents could not sleep with the noise of the green frog ( rana esculanta ) males so we had to catch them and place them in a water canal near our house. During that time we ( me and my brother ) raised tadpoles in our small aquarium in the house and set out the frogs again in the pond and the canal. Recently i went back to the canal and found it completely dead by over-fertilization, no single living creature in it. 10 years back we catched the green frogs with a bucket on a rope just by dragging it through the canal !!
After and during my studies at the university of technology in Eindhoven ( chemical engineering ) i started working in the south of Limburg at DSM ( a chemical but transforming to life science company ).
At my present house i also have a pond were i tried several times to raise froglets and set them out, unfortunately the fish eat the tadpoles and the cats ( of the neighbours ) the frogs ! Every now and then a green or brown frog stays during the summer !!. On the foto you can see the proof ( if you can find the frog )
During a rainy day i started surfing the internet for vivaria for frogs and found the site of vivaria in amsterdam. The combination of the most beatiful and tempting frogs, the small self containing biotope were beatiful plants and flowers could be kept and the technological challenge of this experiment was to much for me to resist. The rest you can read in the journal.
About this site
The making of this site was quite an amount of work, and it was a result of pure hobbyism. At the end i have more work maintaining this website than i have with the frogs, anyway it results in a number of nice reactions which keeps me motivated to go on. This website is a more proffesional version of my homepage. This homepage was a free 25 MB room i had with my internet provider, unfortunately the amount of traffic became limiting and the threath existed that it was blocked ( too much datatraffic ), therefore i registered poison-frogs.com and poison-frogs.nl and searched for a webhost. Since this will only cost money the hobby starts to get out of hand, but i hope you like the work i do and i hope at the end that this work will indeed help the poison frogs from not being the following species to become extinct.
This site was made with homesite 4.5. The whole site has been written in straight HTML, i did not use any designer option or front window ( like front page does ). These programs have a tendency to add a lot of useless codes in the pages, which makes the pages go slower then required for the function. This also me more insight in this language, so that new pages came quickly and the structure became more difficult. Since i am still learning the site will be updated regularly, new knowledge is incorporated as soon as i master it. For me this whole site was about learning this new tekst editing and programming language, and learning more on the phenomenon that is going to change our way of living more than most people expect : the internet.
The menu structure is simple, people usually have no difficulty in navigating through the site, secondly i have treid to limit the number of menu layers to 3 maximum.
The films were made with a straightforward video-8 camera ( sony handycam ) and transferred and digitized with a matrox video card with analog video connection. The films were edites with avid cinema ( a program that does not exist anymore, without any service ) and saved as .Mov files.
Most pictures were made with a new digital camera I received for my birthday in 2001. A pentax Optio 330, with a 3.3 megapixel fotochip and 6x zoom function, and more important a macro function. All pictures were taken outside the vivarium through the glass, most of the time without flash since that changes the colours and the looks too much. Especially in the top of the vivarium no flash is needed.
Recently I recieved from my wife a new camera a Canon EOS 300 D, a 6,3 Megapixel Digital SLR camera which mounts my older zoom-lenses. Together with the tripod and remote control, I can make a lot of pictures very quickly and select the best for you. A truly wonderfull addition to my hobby, this camera option. Also here the frogs usually are quit so you do not need to use a flash for good pictures, colours remain perfect this way. Since the tripod does not let you put the camera against the window sometimes too much reflection is the result with the double glazing in my large vivarium.
I hope you enjoyed the website, please react if you liked it so that i get some feedback on a lot of hard work.
Marc van Doorn
This site can at best be seen in a framed form, in case you do not see the frame : click here and you will be rerouted
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I was born in Tilburg, The Netherlands, lived most of my youth in Loon op Zand ( near the Efteling, were frogs come to life in the 25 year old fairytale of the indian waterlillies ) and grew a interest in frogs during that time. In that region it was not difficult to find them and place them in the pond of our home, unfortunately my parents could not sleep with the noise of the green frog ( rana esculanta ) males so we had to catch them and place them in a water canal near our house. During that time we ( me and my brother ) raised tadpoles in our small aquarium in the house and set out the frogs again in the pond and the canal. Recently i went back to the canal and found it completely dead by over-fertilization, no single living creature in it. 10 years back we catched the green frogs with a bucket on a rope just by dragging it through the canal !!
At my present house i also have a pond were i tried several times to raise froglets and set them out, unfortunately the fish eat the tadpoles and the cats ( of the neighbours ) the frogs ! Every now and then a green or brown frog stays during the summer !!. On the foto you can see the proof ( if you can find the frog )