Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I would like to put my corn is a realistic terrarium...are there any problems with using soil and real plants? If not, would types of soil are good? Regular potting soil, peat moss, etc...

Thanks

Try to get some back issues of Reptiles mag. There are some great articles on this subject. The only draw back is that your snake is going to kill whatever plant you put in there if you don't rotate it out. That mean you need to keep it in a pot and have back-up plants. Other than that go nuts.
Good Luck
Jason

Realistic terrarium.... dirt, a bunch of rotting leaves and maybe one plant or two. That's honestly how they live in the wild... they hide under layers of leaves. They rattle their tails because it imitates a rattlesnake when they're on the dead leaves.

As far as you are talking "realistic" however, I would not use dirt. Dirt has too may potentials for parasites, pain to clean, they cant burrow in it, etc... You definately don't want potting soil - the fertilizers could be toxic. Top soil commonly has a lot of cow manure in it, also a lot of potentially harmful bacteria.

Spahgnum moss - rinse it out WELL. It commonly carries a parasite called Sporotrichum Shenckii. This has been the culprit of giving several humans Menengitis, but i'm unsure of its harm done to reptiles (however i'm sure it's not great.) Rinsing it out, however, will not get rid of all the S. Schenckii.

What I would do is use aspen for a substrate, then get yourself some potted pothos plants. These are low light plants that will grow in anything that's wet. If you want to be really safe, what I would do is since you're going to have to repot these anyway, go down to the pet store and buy yourself a brick of ground coco husk. You soak the brick in water and it becomes almost like dirt. Rinse all the dirt off the root of your pothos plant and replant it in this coco husk in a pot. you'll need to swap it in and out of the cage, as it's been said, to keep the snake from crushing it to death.

here's a picture of my green tree pythons enclosure. i use a mixture of the ground and chipped coco husk in here, so i have the plants directly in the substrate. Also, being an arboreal snake, he never crawls over them so I don't need to worry about switching them out. By the way, I wouldn't reccomend this substrate for a corn. Its designed to be used moist, for high humidity snakes. If it dries out, it can get impacted in the eyes.

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0.1 Licorice Stick Black Rat
1.0 Black Rat
0.1 Vietnamese Blue Beauty
1.0 Green Tree Python
0.1 Texas Bairds Rat

The educated are the few. The uneducated are the masses.

Dirt ...... bad idea.