Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am curious to see/ hear about some enclosures that anacondas are kept/ thrive in. From my research the enclosure should be quite elaborate? Or should it not? Elaborate meaning half water, half land, high maintenance etc... Just curious, thinking about getting one eventually.

Thanks,
Dan

Nevermind- I finally found some previous entries on this subject... I wonder if it really matters if you go with a small enclosure, small water dish and hide or go with the entire 'room cage' with a basically a pool inside of it? If they are happy either way why would one go through the trouble of such a big enclosure? Personally I would say they are big snakes, they need big enclosures- but it seems like some have proved that theory wrong, and have had great success.

I guess I am trying to relate it to monitors which may not be applicable at all; but if you have a blackthroat that gets 6 feet long, you NEED to have a big cage, it is a big lizard. Not the same for snakes?

You seem to have figured this one out for yourself. While your monitors need the "leg room", anacondas do not. The snakes seem content to just hang out if everything is provided for them correctly, while monitors will dig, climb, burrow, etc. even when they are provided with perfect environmental parameters. The larger and more elaborate the snake enclosure, the more chance for husbandry errors there is. A large naturalistic enclosure is really neat as a display but is much more challenging to maintain. It seems that in the end, the snakes don't really care or else we would see signs of distressed behavior in the simpler set ups. The husbandry advantages of the simpler set-ups without the big water pools definitely outweigh the disadvantages, as you read in earlier forum posts.