I have only one yellow mud, he's been living in a clear Rubbermaid under-the-bed storage box since 1996 or 1997. I went with that because he doesn't like deep water, it's lightweight easy to clean & it has more floor space for him than a glass tank does.
I tried a deeper tank for him once, he seemed stressed out all the time, he just doesn't seem to like swimming & in the deeper tank he wasn't able to stand & just simply poke his nares out of the water to get air. That's what he likes to do.
The deeper tank didn't last long because he seemed to really not like it at all.
As for basking he doesn't like to be out of water very much. When I do take him out he seems stressed but when he gets back into the water he looks so relieved.
His water is shallow, I've always been afraid that if he had a stack of rocks to climb onto like my painted has, he might fall over backwards then drown so what I did instead was I put thick brick like rocks under the tank on one end & slanted it, with more of a slant in one corner. He can walk into that corner to get out of the water if he wants to.
He has a hide box in the "tank" & it's an upside down 3 gallon Rubbermaid storage box with 2 doorways cut into it on opposite sides. He spends about 95% of his time in his hide box.
He comes out when he wants food.
Now that he's basically full grown I've noticed that when he wants to go to the deeper end of the tank he'll drag his hide box with him. When he first started doing that I thought he didn't mean to do it so I'd move it back to it's usual spot, half an hour later I'd find he'd moved again, apparently to the spot where he wants it.
I just took that to mean that like our parrot who puts her toys where she wants them, he's doing the same with his hide box so I stopped moving it for him.
He's done fine in the plastic storage box for years, I can't see any reason to move him to glass when I can't find a glass tank that's as roomy as this storage box is.
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PHRatz
