Cypress Mulch

Hello, I'm thinking about switching from paper towels to cypress mulch for my ball pythons who currently live in their tubs on a rack. Why? Because I'm sick of them messing around with the paper towels and there is a big temp difference above and underneath the towel. For example, above the paper towel, it shows about 89 degrees and underneath the towel, it shows about 98 degrees. I don't want to burn my pythons.

My question is this, if I buy cypress mulch, I know that there is a possibility of mites or some kind of bugs in the mulch. I could put the mulch in the oven but it is kind of silly to do so because I have too many pythons.

What would you recommend? Is it safe to use PAM on the mulch? Or ? ? ?

Thank you.

If anything, aspen, not cypress.


There should not be such a big difference between over, and under the paper towel. If you are using something other than a good temp gun, or a thermometer with a probe (like those notoriously unreliable round ones) you are asking for trouble.

Have you considered newspaper? Cheapest and best option to me.

I use cypress i have a deep freezer and freeze the bag of cypress and eliminated the bug problem just by doing that. i was spraying it with reptile releif and that was working great but the fereezer is the easiest

I do have a heat gun and I have the probe hooked up to a herpstat. I also have the zoomed thermometer and the thermometer shows exactly the same result as my heat gun.

I do have reptile relief spray. How much of that should I use?

I used cypress for quite a while before switching to paper and have recently been considering going back for various reasons. After doing a lot of similar research, it seemed like extreme heat, extreme cold or mite treatments are your best bet if you're really worried about mites.

After reading many similar threads about this topic, I decided the threat of mites from the cypress mulch wasn't worth the effort in pre-treating for it. I never noticed a single mite in any of my enclosures while using it and it sounds like many other keepers have had the same experience.

Has anyone actually seen or heard of a case of someone getting mites from cypress mulch?

There shouldn't be any measurable difference between the floor of the tub and the top of the paper towels... Cypress/aspen/eco-earth on the other hand will have a big difference.

How many sheets of paper are you using? (you only need 1)

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Originally Posted by FoxReptiles

I used cypress for quite a while before switching to paper and have recently been considering going back for various reasons. After doing a lot of similar research, it seemed like extreme heat, extreme cold or mite treatments are your best bet if you're really worried about mites.

After reading many similar threads about this topic, I decided the threat of mites from the cypress mulch wasn't worth the effort in pre-treating for it. I never noticed a single mite in any of my enclosures while using it and it sounds like many other keepers have had the same experience.

Has anyone actually seen or heard of a case of someone getting mites from cypress mulch?

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There have been a few threads here with cases. Basically it boils down to the store had mites and they got into the bags of substrate. It certainly isn't terribly common.