Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi Ingo. Altough we've never talked, I've followed your posts for a long time now. I have a printout of one of your cages, its a black cage that has 3 candles in it. I'm using it in reference to making my own cage. I'm wondering what your method is to hang the vines? You also have plants at the very top hanging down on each side, how did you do this?

One last question, what kind of plants are in this cage?

Thanks for your help...

DaveMan

Candles in it?
Are you talking about this cage? -there are candles standing in front of it
For this one I use one 70 W HQI D Metal halide, one 150 W Metal halide of the same type plus 4 x 23 W incandescent fluorescent bulbs for lighting.
The pic is old, today the plants in the cage are much more dense and grow a lot.
So I have to remove part of the vines, the fucus and the Dracaena on a regular basis.
Vines are fixed to sticks crosoing the top screened top of the enclosure.
The tank has a backwall built as fake rocks from styrofoam, PU Foam and concret.
Several flower pots are integrated into this wall and diverse plants vine out from this region covering the backwall and part of the side walls.
These days this cage harbours plants of the following geni: Dieffenbachia ; Dracaena (2 species), Ficus (pumila, benjamini, elastica); Neoregelia (2 species), Guzmania, Aechmea, Hoya, Passiflora, Philodendron (just scandens) and Epipremnium. In the water bassin Riccia, Ceratopteris and Shinnersia are growing.

Hope that helps

Ingo

Thats a beautiful cage ingo but dont you find that crickets tend to hide in all the cracks and its hell to clean? What do you keep in it? I'm just curious because I want to set up a cage that looks nice and naturalistic but I dont want to spend 2 days cleaning it and constantly worrying about my animals not being able to find bugs to eat.

Cleaning the cage costs me about 15 minutes a week.
I only wipe the glass and remove feces from leaves. The rest is done by a large population of soil organisms which let vanish dead insects and feces very rapidly.
Once a month I exchange 50% of the pond water and cut plants which have grown too much. Thats ist.
There are some hidden escape proof feeding bowls in the tank, but most feeder items I just throw in, to allow the animals to display their natural feeding behaviour.
And yes, crickets and diverse roaches do multiply in the tank.
But a pair of Bufo paracnemis helps to keep them short and the 1,2 tokays (plus varying numbers of offspring) do find a lot of the nocturnal insects and of those feeders which hide in crevices.
Besides these animals 1,2 Basiliscus plumifrons and 1,1 Gonocephalus chamaeleontinus inhabit the tank.
All animals -with exception of the toads- do breed regularily.
If I would want to breed the toads, I would have to remove them from the that tank for apt cycling.
But I am not interested in producing a few thousend toadlets which are impossible to sell.
So they just stay in the tank.

Ci@o

Ingo

Yep, that was the cage I was talking about.

Thanks Ingo!