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ViperJr

A quest for red eyes - PART 1

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September, two thousand and ten. A harsh, rainy day at the dawn of fall. The pre-phase was completed. The preparations were in order.The research had been done. The care sheet were read, all of them. The time had come to start building a terrarium. A terrarium for the most fascinating, most beautiful and most awesomely epic of all frogs. A terrarium for Agalychnis callidryas. A terrarium, nay, a home, for some Red-eyed tree frogs.
The tank were build and the frogs lived happily ever after, right? No no, not just yet. As the Internet meme goes (with a slight editation): One does not simply acquire frogs into Mordor!

Now that I got you all interested with my amazing storytelling voice, let's continue the in a less demanding type of writing:

After reading enough care sheet, lurking around on different websites, talking to people that used to have red-eyes, I decided I was finally ready to buy some books about them. After that, I was truly ready to start building the terrarium. And by building, I of course mean buying an Exo-Terra tank!
The journey continued in the local petstore "Djurmagasinet" ("Animal store"). Umeå's only petstore that actually have reptile products. Overpriced and a incredible bad range of product, but still. Turns out, they have even less then I remembered, but after a little chat with some sort of manager, they decided to get some of the products we wanted for us. The same day, I finally order the juicy stuff that I've looked up on a Swedish Internet-store, "Reptillagret" ("Reptile stock").
About a week later, both the shipments arrived at the nearest post office. Needless to say, I have not bicycled so fast since I got the shipment for the snake terrarium.

The two first shipments:

Djurmagasinet
Exo-Terra's Terrarium 60x45x60 ( 24"x18"x24") - 2039 kr / 325 USD
Exo-Terra's Compact top - 285 kr / 45 USD
Exo-Terra's Combometer - 239 kr / 38 USD
Exo-Terra's Coco husk - 45 kr / 7 USD
Exo-Terra's Forest moss - 90 kr / 14 USD
Pea gravel - 42 kr / 6.5 USD
Mangrove root - 115 kr / 18 USD

Total: 2861 kr / 454 USD


Reptillagret
Namiba terra's Java cascading corner waterfall - 961 kr / 152 USD
Zoomed's ReptiFogger - 749 kr / 119 USD
Repti therm UTH - 519 kr / 82 USD
2x T-rex bio vines - 216 kr / 34 USD
3x Coco husk pot - 143 kr / 23 USD
Planteau rock, plant pot - 137 kr / 22 USD
1 bag of frog moss - 57 kr / 9 USD

Total: 2919 kr / 464 USD

When I had everything at home, it was time to start trying to make everything into a terrarium! But first, I went away for about 5 weeks. Could not stop thinking about the tank for 1 minute during that time!
Anyway, back home again, it was time to visit 4 different types of plant stores to get everything I wanted. It costed about 250 kr / 40 USD (and another 120 kr / 19 USD if you add that I had to change the Dieffenbachia seguine 3 times).
Pothos
2 bamboo
Snake plant
Dieffenbachia seguine

The mailman had also dropped of another small shipment containing Novibra ( http://www.hifiborsen.se/images/prod...d/novibra2.jpg ). It's a vibration-reduce rubber mat, that you put the tank on. I payed 99 kr / 15 USD for it.

And now... Time to tank it up!

The tank just out of the box

http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e...6dc3d_Tomt.JPG

Some of the stuff

http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e...rejor%20va.JPG

Trying to get hold of how big the tank is. The water bowl in the picture were never used in the end. The second Compact top was returned as well, after some back and forth-ing with the lights. I will cover this later.
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e..._Lysramper.JPG

Testing the waterfall


Placing the waterfall


“wat… i bought moar stone than this…”
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e34204734b32_wat.JPG

ReptiFogger – The funniest thing ever created
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e...hiny%20fog.JPG
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e...24b_fogger.JPG
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e...moar%20fog.JPG
http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman02/4e..._fogfogfog.JPG

A few hours later, it was time to leave the ReptiFogger and actually trying to do something. I had a friend over at the time, so we started gluing one of the coco husk pot in place with silicon. After that, we started to plant the plants



After that, we tried to get the planteau pot up. It was harder than it looks, and I got to say that it looks kind of hard already…


I eventually finished the interior of the terrarium. However, there was one little detail. I did not want to buy Exo-Terra’s terrarium stand for about a million dollars, so I decided to make one myself. My beloved girlfriend and her brother help me a lot with this!
We did only buy the handle and a couple of screws for this, for about 100 kr / 16 USD. I used what I could find in my girlfriend’s parenthouse.

At first, things went like this:


Then, more like this:


After a while, a wild paint can appeared:



And then, finally, it was complete! The tank, with interior and its stand!


PLEASE NOTE: THE BLOG CONTINUES ON PART 2

Updated July 31st, 2011 at 10:44 AM by ViperJr

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