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On this page you can find information about how I set up my terrariums and my approach to general care and maintenance. |
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When I first started keeping snakes there wasn't the choice of ready made trrariums that there is today and so I built my own terrariums from melamine with sliding glass doors. The melamine was good at holding temperature and if you took care not to damage the surface and sealed all the edges with silicone they held up very well to moisture too. The one big drawback with melamine was the weight of the finished terrariums.
Below is an image of part of my current set up in Sweden.
All my terrariums are heated using ceiling mounted heat panels that are controlled by Pulse Proportional, Day/Night Thermostats. Daylight lighting is on all my terrariums is Arcadia jungle dawn full spectrum LED and allows for good lighting with very little heat output. In keeping with current thinking within herpetoculture I am planning on adding UVB lighting in the near future to most of my collection.
Any young that I produce are kept in a rack system that has back heat supplied by heat mats covering the back wall of the rack. They are again controlled by Pulse Proportional thermostats and have a general temperature of 29.5C at the rear of the tubs and 27.5C at the front with no night drop.
The tubs are kept quite basic to allow for easy cleaning and generally have paper towels for substrate with plastic mesh perches, plastic hide boxes with an entrance hole cut in the top and small glass water bowls.
I change all my animals water at least a couple of times a week and disinfect all water bowels every two weeks. To disinfect the water bowels, feeding tongs, hooks and to clean tubs/terrariums when needed I use a product called DAX Plus. Research into python digestion has shown the intestines and liver grow in size by up to three times their original size after prey is swallowed. These organs begin to shrink in size again after the prey passes through the intestines and return to normal size within the next eight days or so after the prey has been digested. |
I build display style terrariums for my collection rather than using rack style accommodation. This is purely personal preference, however I do find when observing my adult animals at night under low intensity red light, all of my collection will make full use of the space they are given.
I provide perches with plant cover above them for my arboreal snakes and I find that the daily resting places of these animals vary quite frequently. Rather than always sitting on the highest perch as is commonly reported in many arboreal species most of my arboreal snakes choose to sit in areas that have leaf cover above them.
This male Morelia viridis (Green tree python) uses three or four perch positions in his terrarium but almost always chooses areas of perch that are under leaf cover. Something new that I have been trying recently is adding backgrounds to my terrariums. I have tried to add to the terrariums usable space by incorporating shelves and hides in the background design at both the warm and cool sides of the terrarium, whilst giving the terrariums a more natural look. One big advantage that I have found with using a background is how easy it is to quickly increase humidity, as the background gives a much larger surface area to spray when needed. I've also started to use a bio active substrate and plant directly into this rather than keeping the plants in pots. After trying this in a couple of terrariums I changed nearly all my terrariums from bark chip substrate to bio active. Another scaped enclosure The bio active substrates ability to hold moisture and keep humidity levels up whilst staying dry on the surface compared to the bark chip, showed instant results with better sheds, especially with Leiopython albertisi, a very thin skinned python that can often have trouble sloughing in one piece. I have also noticedmore active behaviour generally in my snakes since changing substrate.
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