Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I'm considering using a commercially sold landscaping mulch as a substrate for my jungle carpet python. She will be fed in a separate container. What are the possible negatives to this?

I would'nt use landscape mulch for a couple of reasons.
It is usually made of died garbage wood, wich mean you will have a red animal, living in moldy bacteria filled, bug infested wood.
If it's hardwood mulch...see above, just take out the red dye part.
If it's cedar mulch it can harm your herps.
However if it's cypress you should be ok...just bake it first to kill the bugs.
I live in the north, most landscape mulch here is cedar, or dyed wood chips.
We dont have cypress here.

Depending on the mulch it can be harmful or not. As it's been said, don't use cedar, anything died red, or pine (of course). Or bark.

Cypress is perfectly fine to use, in fact I know some breeders who do use this a lot - it aids greatly in keeping up the humidity levels. It's not necessary to bake the cypres... you will get a bunch of little gnat type bugs flying around in your cage for the first week or so, but they wont harm your snakes in the least. They'll die off eventually, and with spot cleaning this stuff can last for a LONGGGG time. For chondros most people keep it for upwards of a year before changing it out (with spot cleaning, of course)
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-Chris

The reason mainstream thought is thought of as a stream is because it's so shallow. -George Carlin

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Current snakes:
0.1 Licorice Stick Black Rat (Lola)
1.0 Black Rat (Frankie)
0.1 Texas Bairdi (Rosa)
0.1 Blue Beauty (Brunhilde)
1.0 Green Tree Python (Monty)