Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hey,

I have a 3 year old ball python and it needs a new environment.

Right now, I have him in a basic dirt style terranium and I am looking to get him a new habitat. I want to make it look natural and feel natural to him, so I want to put live plants and stuff in there. His cage is a 50 gallon tank and is pretty long. I was thinking about buying or building a new cage for him so he can have one area that is water and the other that is land (the two are partitioned off from one another). However I am having a hard time finding anything like that and, it is hard to build. I was thinking about building him a new tank anyways and I want something that is good for him but that also looks good in my apartment.

How big do I need to make his cage to do this, or is his cage fine? What kind of plants should I put in there to make it look real? How do I build a tank like this? Does anyone know a good tank/aquarium store in the Dallas, TX area?

Thanks Ya'll

50 gallon will be more than enough. JUst use that. and please tell me you didnt use dirt from outside?

get aspen of repti-bark or cypress mulch. get plenty of driftwood peices, and like 3 hides.

All ball pythons do is wreck live plants. So you might as well get fake ones.
if you want to build a cage, that will hold water, make part of the cage into a deepish square, put plastic linning in there, thats about all I can think of. Melamine is good. Use aquarium grade silicone ,DO NOT USE bathroom silicone.

I would not advise using dirt. It is very hard to keep clean, the urates will just soak into the dirt and you won't know how far down it has gone, it will grow nasty bacteria's. And you have to continusly bake it to get it clean.
Try using eco-earth bed-a-beast, and
I personally use aspen shavings which work so good! it's awesome for spot cleaning and I used a quarter of a bag fo 2 4ft long cages, that still has the same aspen in there, and it keeps humidity great.

With a 50 gal tank you MIGHT want something wider, but it will work. Just use a large rubber maid, and you can hot glue some SMOOTH river rocks on to it that you can get at wal-mart for looking smooth, just make sure that no substrate gets down in there.

If you do an extensive search on the internet you can find a place that makes and sells land/water snake cages. Here is the website!

It may be a bit expensive, but if I only had one snake to spend all my money on, I would be getting one of these!

http://www.jworlds.net/units.html
Link

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1.1 Ball Python, 0.1 motley amel corn