One of the groups of reptiles I worked on was varanids(still to some extent) With that group, I found they were very tied to soil type, in captivity and in nature. We should have already understood this as its in most old field guides, as I mentioned to you. I will skip a lot.



After testing different materials for a couple decades, I was apparent that in most cases, problems were not about soils, but were about people, again. There is a huge difference between most store bought materials and natural materials. In a nutshell, store bought sands are manufactured, sands are made by crushing rocks. Again in a nutshell, sand(silica) is glass or what glass is made from. So its simple to picture crushed sand is hard edged and abrasive. Natural sands are rounded and smooth. I use to build zoos and pumped many miles and miles of concrete, pumped concrete is often called shotcrete. When I worked in the west and concrete is made from natural sands, the concrete pumps had no problems and the values lasted for a very long time. Then I rebuilt Audubon park, in New Orleans and we had to use manufactured sand, That crap destroyed my machines. We had to replace the harden steel valves weekly.



So its fairly easy to see why some folks, caresheets, make claims that sand is bad. Crushed sand is bad, not natural sand.



natural sands, are not graded and sifted which means, they normally are a combination of sizes, one of which is called fines. When pumping concrete, fines are added to lubricate the sand particules and allow them to flow. In New Orleans, we had to add clay, which is super slick(carbon and fines) or my pumps simply plugged up.

So, graded, manufactured sands, indeed are hard to pass for reptiles and indeed can plug them up and kill them. End part 1

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