talkmagic.co.uk

Next to magic and skateboarding the other enduring hobby/obsession of my life has been the captive care of exotic creatures, you know snakes n lizards and that. It's been a while now since I've had any though, mostly because I've not had the time or space or stability (in terms of permanent address, not mental stability) to look after them. In fact it's about three years since Carling the carpet python and Mark the horned frog departed from my life, but I digress.

Now that I seem to be settled and likely to not go through any major life changes until I get married or whatever I've decided to reaquaint myself with my scaly side. Specifically my project for 2008 is going to be the construction of a paludarium. For those of you that don't know, that is a sort of little ecosysytem with all flowing water and branches and stuff, where several different species exist in happy harmony by land sea and air, all compressed into the space of an aquarium.

Thing is, there's an awful lot of research to do and much work to put in before I go ahead and build owt, and I was wondering if anyone here had any experience of a similar undertaking (that would be the jackpot) or knows of any handy resources. If there's another forum like this one that has good relevant advice that'd be handy, I spent a couple of hours Googling last night and found a few places that look promising but you know, the word of mouth stuff is the best. Ditto books, I've got a decent collection of stuff about species care but if there's a good resource for what I'm after specifically again that would be marvellous.

Cheers to anyone that can help.....

I had a pet tarantula, but nothing as ambitious as you're planning, I'm afraid.

http://badmanstropicalfish.com/paludarium/paludarium.html
and
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/pic/article.cfm?N=2006&aid=1446 but you probably have them already.

http://www.geocities.com/~amazingaquaria/fiftyp.htm piccy one.

http://www.joejaworski.com/palu/palu1.htm and this one.

http://www.csd.net/~cgadd/aqua/46g.htm now youv'e got me interested after the move.

I had an indoor fountain in my iguana's vivarium. I can try to dig it out if thats any use to you. Even if you want a custom waterfall, you can always use the pump and ditch the rest.

His viv grew as he did, I kept adding new bits and knocking through into them or stacking on top.

If you are after plastic foliage, don't get it from the big garden stores, they charge bundles for it. I used to get it from my local hardware shop. He would get it specially for me from his supplier, a couple of carrier bags full would be about 15 quid. The same amount from the larger stores would have set me back at least 50 maybe more.

Also be careful what branches you use, some can be harmful to small creatures

What creature(s) are you planning on getting?

Cheers guys, those links'll be handy Disco (I've come across one already but not the others) and I might take you up on the pump Jeff.

I won't be getting anything big in terms of critters, the whole tank will be about 4ft wide by 18 inches deep by 2ft-3ft tall I reckon, in that I'd ideally like a pair of lizards, some frogs and newts/axolotls maybe plus some little tropical fish and maybe some snails and or other water creatures. The dream would be to have some poison dart frogs in the trees, they're probably the over-riding favourite animal, but they're quite sensitive and I don't know what would go in there with them.

As I said there's an awful lot of book work to get on with as I haven't kept fish at all and the plants will have to be live too so it'll probably be up and running for a few weeks at least to sort out the air/water ventilation/circulation etc before any live creepy crawlies go in there. The best approach appears to be to practice on a small tank first to iron out any problems before cracking on with the main project. Ideally the main thing will be going by mid 2008 but we'll have to see. On the plus side, once you get everything fine tuned it apparently runs along quite nicely without constant maintenance, for example the animal poo acts as fertiliser for the plants so there's less cleaning than you'd think. Should be fun!

The best approach appears to be to practice on a small tank first to iron out any problems before cracking on with the main project.

plus you have a spare habitat shouldyou big tank need maintanace or you need to seperate sick animals.
neon tetra are great tropical fish, there small, hardy and can tolerate a wide varity of tempratures and water qualities and they tend not to be eaten by the other creatures.

Remember that a small tank is harder to keep stable microclimate wise. I second magicdiscoman for neons as an all round fish. Mountain Minnows also survive a wide range of temperatures, maybe even better than Neons. Both are about the same size, with the Neons tending to stay lower in the water than the Minnows.As I think you are wanting shallow, running water in the tank, I think Mountain Minnows have the edge, mainly because Neons don't tend to like being at the surface as much. Both need to have more than 2 or 3 fish as they prefer to shoal.
Don't rush putting things in and prepare for anything you plant, plastic or otherwise, to be pulled up!
I used to have 4 aquariums with different types of fish. I trie dto make them suitable for each, i.e Cichlids had soft rock which dissolved to make the right nutrient and PH balance. This will be the sort of thing you need to check. If you want a certain species etc, get as much information on those first, get the enviroment right for them, then see what others you can put in the same enviroment.
PS, I always made sure my Pirrahna tank had lots of clear space in the centre. It meant I could keep an eye on them when I put my hand in so they could take bits of meat out of my fingers! I'm not sure if it took nerve or stupidity, though I did used to get my python to take Pinkies from my fingures aswell.

Keep us informed as I would be very interested how you get on.

Right, just gonna see if I can post photo's, if so it's time for a two year update:

Cool, so that works. That's the full tank shot from the front, as you can see from reading the above it's pretty different to the original spec. What happened was this...

I spent an awful lot of time reading and planning and getting things wrong. I bought a tank of roughly the proportions mentioned earlier and got to work but after a while several design flaws became evident that led to that tank being donated to a mate as a back up aquarium. In the meantime though I got really into the idea of dart frogs and realised that they need to be the only terrestrial animals in the set up, I bought a couple of dendrobates tinctorius that were in the tank pictured above and planned to keep them in there until the other one was ready.

As it became obvious that the original tank wasn't going to work as I'd like I decided instead to spruce up what I had and thus ended up with the current 'bronziverse'. This is the remaining frog (one unfortunately died due to bullying stress from the other, turns out the 'pair' I was sold were actually two females and in the dart frog world girls don't play nice) sitting on the big fern:



Here's a couple of the water feature, currently home to a couple of glowlight tetras, an albino cory catfish and some shrimp:





And some more views from inside:





I can put up some more specific ones if anyone's interested, the amount of research that's gone into this is phenomenal and as expected there are lots of things I'd change! I'm now planning the next, bigger tank and annoying the hell out of the missus by constantly staring into a glass box o'plants and ignoring her.

Wow! I've always wanted to do something like this. But...Dart frogs??? And you say you want to live???

Hahaha yeah I do like to tell people they're poisonous. It's easier than explaining that in fact there are only three species of poison frog out of the couple of hundred in the wild that are dangerous to humans, and in captivity even these aren't poisonous at all. The exact source of their poison in the wild isn't completely known but it seems that they synthesize the particular alkaloids responsible from their food and there's a lot more variety on offer in the rainforest than in the average frogger's frutifly collection.

bronz wrote:Hahaha yeah I do like to tell people they're poisonous.

Then throw one in their mouth and run! But you mean they aren't really poisonous? So all those times checking the corners S.A.S style as I go through chester zoo were wasted???

Well I wouldn't lick one (save that for certain Mexican toads) but the only thing they really hurt is your wallet when you buy 'em. Still pretend they are when you see them though it makes for a much more exciting experience.

Interesting...
*camando rolls out of door, firing off bursts from a rambo-style heavy gun*