Quote:
Originally Posted by dannybgoode
You should see what happens when you put a bonsai label on a pair of scissors!
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Do you do bonzai danny? I've been watching a youtuber who does it and have considered getting into it myself. Could you PM me some tips?
Also to the OP, if it's gonna be a large snake you're gonna have some challenges that aren't really present in other species if you're gonna want to use a naturalistic substrate.
I've never had to tackle the challenge of using a natural substrate with a species as strong and large as a burmese python.
If it were me and I was dead set on a naturalistic vivarium for a snake that large there would be no other choice but to go bioactive. I'm not cleaning out 40lbs of wood chips every month. You'd need the right mix (it would have to be able to be humid without turning into a mud pie) and you'd need a veritable army of microfauna to make it work.
You'd need enough depth of substrate to handle the weight and typical methods of a draining layer might not work (the egg crate method for example would break pretty easily with that large of an animal I'd think). I don't know if they burrow but they know that the pythons are using gopher tortoise burrows in the wild to expand their range and wait out the dry season in Florida so if the snake is just flinging crap all over it might not work at all.
I would personally use topsoil, cocoa fiber, eco earth, sphagnum moss, sand, gravel, activated charcoal, shredded up leaves, maybe some other stuff as well, probably combine that with a commercial bioactive substrate as well. I'd use every kind of microfauna available, earth worms, springtails, multiple isopods. Then every time you upgrade the cage basically just dump the old substrate in with the new substrate so your populations can just spread like that.
The whole floor would be covered in various leaves. It would be a massive undertaking and quite frankly it might fail miserably leaving me using paper. Either way I hope you have great luck in this endeavor.
Hybrid Mode
