Dear Robin,



thats all very true.

The only problem I see with that is that we are talking to Uro keepers, who mainly keep their animals in 55 to 150 g tanks. To my experience, Uros normally have to test several places to burrow and even in my tank with more than 6 x 5 ft floor space, the tank looked horrible in that time and I doubt they easily find THE perfect place in small tanks. Also there are occasions, where you want to check your Uro, want to control if left over skin is still harmless or due to wounds or infections, look for signs of gravidity and the like. Less tame specimens always quickly vanish in their burrows and there you stand.

I very much favour big naturalistically furnished tanks -see example pic of my basilisk tank- but I know that not every herper is willind or able to significantly exceed tha 55-150g range for his Uros and I appreciate the ease of controllign the animals in the hide boxes. Again I want to stress the imnportance of the initial sand filling. This gives the Uro the impression to dig itself and in my hands ends with non extra digging Uros which fully accept the artificial burrows. Even for a small tank of 100g , its relatively easy to add 3-5 extensions once you managed to drill the holes into the tank sides. So you can offer a variety of tmeps and humidiites. Do not forget that you are an expereinced expert. But for many Uro keepers out there there still is much confusion about optimal humidity of Uro resting places. So for most it would not be easy to provide an apt gradient in a normal size tank, but its easier to test several variants in seoperated boxes.

Thats my 2 cts



and again-I very much appreciate that finally someone who is heard by the communitiy speaks in favour of natural substrates and furniture. Thats definitely the way to go and if people look over the atlantic , they might see that in our european tanks all that natural stuff does not cause evil things. And maybe som have even heard that german herpers are not too unsuccessful with breeding and maintaining sensitive species. But thats just a sidenote -Unless you have a tank significantly exceeding the sizes of my Uro tank, I think its everything but easy to solve the well known problems just by a deep layer of diggable substrate



Ci@o



Ingo

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