Planning Bioactive - Advice please?

[distaff]

Best of luck with that. It's been tried many times before. Maybe you can actually make it work, most people can't. I've given it a try myself. Frankly what I've found is that ball pythons just get too big, are too destructive to the plants and move the substrate around too much, and frankly just crap too much to make a good go of a bioactive environment. Frankly I gave up before my ball pythons even reached full sized and I found that plastic tubs with a newspaper substrate are MUCH easier to clean and maintain, and the snakes seem to like it better too.

Don't get me wrong, I really like a naturalistic looking tank which is why I have terrariums with small lizards and PDF's with lots of live plants and a misting system and a good number of microfauna. That kind of setup works REALLY well for small geckos and PDF's. It doesn't work so great for something the size of ball pythons. But, give it a shot and see what happens. Make sure to post your results and let us know what works and what doesn't.

Perhaps the missing ingredients have been a clay substrate of suitable mineral composition, and the correct species of termite.

Haven't found much about the natural history of these animals, but my impression is that they don't hang out much in lushly planted areas in the wild. My mental picture is savannah, but I could be completely wrong, and pics I've seen of places like Accra, Ghana have had more greenery.

If the keeper is merely looking for a satisfying aesthetic experience, and not hung up on "bio-active," a naturalistic viv can be much simpler. My king is in a good looking "dry" vivarium. His plastic hides are concealed under large sheets of bark, and an interlocking arrangement of weathered branches fills out the vertical space. The heating is from two UTH's, and since there is no overhead lighting or heaters, all electrical cords are concealed at the bottom. Near one corner, he has an attractive pottery bowl for water set on an irregular slate tile. CareFresh currently covers the rest of the floor; this will be replaced with Sani-chips for a more natural sandy impression. I set the viv up with inspiration from Amano Takashi's (spell?) aquascapes. Even with nothing actually alive in there but the king, it is an attractive viv, and satisfies that snake's husbandry requirements.