XL Exo-Terra Build

[deranged chipmunk]

Very cute little Milkies!! They should be fine in that enclosure for a couple months. As long as they have the basic needs, they should be good.

[Riptide]

Sad day, I lost one of the milks :-(. I'm not sure what happened, he (guessing here) was hopping around fine last night but became listless today and ended up not making it. The temp was at 75 and humidity was at 80-85%.

In better news I finished up the biocube today. Time to let it settle for a little bit. It is a little hard to tell but there is actually a small water feature that runs out of the cork tube onto the flat cork and then drains back into the drainage layer.




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[DigitalPunk]

Sorry to hear about your loss Sky

The tank is looking good Does the water running down the cork flat touch the substrate at all?

[Riptide]

Just at the very bottom, there is a small straw sized hole for the water to drain back down so that it won't saturate everything.


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[flybyferns]

Right now I am keeping them in one of the extra large kritter keeper(14.5 in L x 8.6 in W x 9.6 in H). would it be ok for me to keep them in this container until they get a little bigger? The temp and humidity are holding steady so i'm not worried about those paramenters. I'm thinking they would live in there for no more than a month or two max.

Thoughts?

I believe so

[Riptide]

The milkys got a new 12x12x18 Exo-terra today and they seem much happier. I will be putting a lot more plants in there tomorrow.

Here are some pics

[Riptide]

No real update but I thought I'd share a couple of pictures. The Cobalt was my first PDF, she got me hooked.






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[Mentat]

Very nice Cobalt !

[Riptide]

Very nice Cobalt !

Thank you :-)


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[Riptide]

I am getting much closer to getting the Exo Terra set up now. All the plants have been pulled out of the old tank and have been hit with one dry ice treatment so far but a few more will be done to make sure I have no more slugs.

I found today that the lock on the cage feels really loose and doesn't hold to tight, anyone have any suggestions on how I can fix that?

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[Riptide]

No real movement on the build but I did order a couple more sheets of Aquamat (reportedly a good hygrolon alternative) from First Rays Orchids. We have also started planning what we want the layout of the tank to look like so there is some design work going on

A few days ago I lost another milky :-(. I don't know what happened but it just stopped eating. The last one is quite fat and happy and has close to doubled in size from when I got them. I have come to the conclusion that froglets can be quite tough to raise.


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[Riptide]

I was able to score a brand new XL Exo-Terra for $50 so i wont have to worry about the maintenance issues on the used one :-)

I also scored this little plant but I have no idea what it is. It almost looks like 2 or 3 different plants that have grown together. Does anyone have any ideas?



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[deranged chipmunk]

Can you get a different pic of the plant(s)? Tough to see from the top view.

[Riptide]

Here are a couple other shots. I hope these help.






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[Heatheranne]

I think it's a ficus elastica. I'll check with my plant guy .

[deranged chipmunk]

The first two make me think a ficus sp., but then last pic makes me think it may be a fittonia sp.

[Riptide]

I think it's definitely a ficus, I have other Fittonia plants and it's a lot different than those. Thanks for the ID guys!


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[Riptide]

We started working on the large tank tonight. We should have a lot more done on it tomorrow :-) This is our rough plan for the layout (plenty of small tweaks to the design still to come). The black plastic webbing will be the base for the land area, the rest will be water which will house a bunch of Red Cherry Shrimp. We are going to use ecoweb and hygrolon for the background. There will be a fair amount of hygrolon and Aquamat attached to the branches as well. One of the hopes is to let this tank grow in quite thick so I'm hoping the hygrolon will give me a hand in achieving that. We have a couple more small branches and a small stump like piece that will be added to the land area but are in Chub's (the milk frog) current enclosure.

The overall design



The root area. This is all Manzanita that I gathered from northern California.



This is a close up of the material that I'm using in place of a traditional false bottom. It's a rigid spun plastic that I got from a local pond store. I still have to cover it in screening and then Aquamat will be placed around the edges to keep the shrimp out.



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[Riptide]

Leak test passed! Time to start applying silicon and get everything in place. I'll post pictures soon :-)


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[DigitalPunk]

Always a good feeling when the leak test passes Cant wait to see how it turns out!