Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hello...

I've had my male water dragon for about a year and a half, and he's never had a problem....

....but is pool really annoys me. Not only is his house not that attractive, IMO, but it's really hard to clean the pool.

I use a plastic sweater box about 3 feet long, 2 wide, and only 8" deep. I put a rock under one side, so I can remove water a little easier.

I net out all the heavy particles with a small fish net, and I use a python water changer to suck out the majority of the water. Then, I use paper towels to wipe up excess dirt from the substrate, and I fill it back up.

...but this is somewhat of a pain, but more importantly I'm just removing waste...it's not truly clean!

Am I wrong in assuming water dragons actually need a pool to swim in? I would not think so....no books I own say otherwise...

but how do you create a nice looking, clean pool?

( removing the pool, by the way, is a much longer affair...and not all that easy. )

If anyone else cares to look, I also have more pictures of the WD, his cage, and the other herps here: Herp pics

I used a wetland filter on my last pond and never had to empty the water. You can see photos of it in the photo gallery, I will link to one of them. The basic idea is to have one pond inside of another, the outside pond has lava rocks, moss and plants and the water from the inside pond filters through it.

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how is that built exactly? How does the poop get cleaned? I mean, the water dragon poops like every day. Also, tons of crickets die in the water. How does it clean up big messes like that? Do you use store bought filters as well?

Well, my dragons were adults, so there were no crickets, I handfed them everything. They had their own dragon room, 7x11x5 feet, so no prey was set loose in there. The poop simply floats out of the inside pool and into the moss, where it is quickly broken up by the falling water and filtered through the lava rocks, moss and plants. You just need to have an equal area of land and water, and you do not need any mechanical filtration whatsoever.
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Do you use any specific types of plants or moss? If I just put a larger container under the pool, and filled it randomly with moss, plants, and lava rocks, would that work? Also, you must have a pump to put the water back into the pool, does that have a filter or is it just a pump?

how is that actually filtering anything out if your not using any removable filter? i have never set something up like that but it would seem that a setup like that would just be a breeding ground for everything i strive to keep away from my dragons? please tell me more.