Shipping dart frogs long distances is a common practice in the dart frog hobby. I’ve been curious about in box temperature profiles during transit, so working with other hobbyists we began a project shipping boxes containing battery operated data loggers in a variety of shipping containers. This page contains the summary data from the different shipments we sent.

We kept a consistent route for the experiments, shipping different containers back and forth between Austin TX and Fort Worth TX via FedEx ground to keep overall project costs down. We understood that (1) not shipping via live animal methods and (2) ground shipments not held for pickup would subject the packages to more extreme conditions.

Two Lascar EL-USB-2 data loggers were used during the course of this study. These are battery operated temperature and humidity data loggers that can store 11 days of data sampling at 1 minute intervals. Detailed unit specifications can be found here.

Austin TX to Fort Worth TX, uninsulated box

Our first experiment simply shipped the data logger in an uninsulated box from Austin TX to Fort Worth TX.

Fort Worth TX to Austin TX, insulated box, small cold pack

Austin TX to Fort Worth TX, insulated box & Styrofoam cooler, 3 ice packs

Fort Worth TX to Austin TX, insulated box & Styrofoam cooler, 3 ice packs