Canada Post dropped off a dozen new slings today, so I finally have something living in the custom tank I've secretly been working on for the past while. It's my first experiment with creating a backdrop out of expanding foam and grout, and now houses a bunch of
Holothele incei which will grow and eventually reproduce to thoroughly colonize the whole thing. Just a note for anyone checking this out for ideas for their own projects; this is made specifically for spiders and I had to consider the small size of babies when I was making it! If I were making a reptile enclosure, or even something for a single tarantula or the likes, there are a couple things I would do differently:
- I would build the backdrop on a piece of wood or something so that it would be removable for maintenance, and to avoid messing up the glass while creating it. I made mine inside the tank to ensure no baby spiders would find their way behind/under it
- I wouldn't do the floor in foam/grout, again for maintenance reasons. In this case, the floor stuff is another measure to prevent babies from getting into places they shouldn't be
- I would make it much thinner to maximize the useful space within the tank. For this species, having a greater surface area with more nooks and crannies is more important.
- I'd use a removable water dish...okay, there's no excuse for having a permanent one here, but I expect once my colony is established there will be too much webbing around for a water dish to be kept full anyway(spider silk draws water away very effectively)
Without further ado, I present my step-by-step photos! I do have some more photos of each step, if anyone wants another angle or something.
I started with Great Stuff expanding foam. I used the black pond & stone variety since it has been tested as safe for fish. Others have used the regular Great Stuff without issue but I thought I'd play it safe. By the way, it expands WAY more than this after a few hours!!
I stuck this piece of driftwood in there while the foam was still setting. It was used by another tarantula for several years, so I cleaned it and baked it for a while before use. It's really the main structure in this whole think and adds a lot of depth(the right side of it actually protrudes far enough at one point where it almost touches the front glass) as well as more caves and nooks for the spiders.
Grouted the whole thing with zero-VOC grout. I had to do a few layers to fill in all the gaps. I shone a bright light from inside the enclosure to locate and fill all the little holes leading to the non-habitable parts.
The shape of the driftwood made a perfect water reservoir in one spot, so I grouted that too and then coated it with aquarium silicone to make it waterproof.
I dry-brushed the grout with nontoxic waterproof acrylic paint to make it look less like grout. Didn't turn out very good, but looks fine in the finished product anyway. By the way, I did make a huge mess of foam, grout, silicone, and paint on the glass where it wasn't supposed to be and had to scrape it off by hand. Building a backdrop outside of the tank would definitely be the best way to go if you don't have to consider sneaky baby spiders.
I used aquarium silicone to glue some eco earth and sphagnum moss onto the grout and driftwood, then dumped some loose eco earth on the floor and the flatter areas on top of the driftwood. This species doesn't burrow, but the eco earth will be kept moist to support some springtails and isopods that will keep everything tidy. After this addition, I had to stop and laugh at how gross the bottom edge looks! I might paint the glass on the outside to hide the ugly foam/grout layers visible on the bottom and sides of the tank.
Here is the finished product. Some of the moss needs to be tweaked a bit, or even trimmed, and I haven't decided where I want to position the lights or exactly what colour I want them to be, but otherwise I'm happy with it. The lighting is multi-coloured LEDs, so I can choose any colour/brightness/whatever and position them in a variety of ways. We'll see.
And here's a blurry shot of one of the happy new inhabitants. The photo is terrible, but the babies are metallic green with pink legs and black "boots" with white "socks". Mature adults are gold or olive with black stripes. This is a very popular communal species because they're new-world, very hardy, and demonstrate a variety of social interactions such as group hunting and maternal care. I'm stoked to finally have some!
EDIT: For an idea of the the time this took; each step pictured above took less than an hour to apply, but there was a lot of setting time involved. I gave the expanding foam 2 weeks to air out, the grout got 1 week, the silicone got 3 days each time, and the acrylic paint got 2 days.
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