Quote Originally Posted by MarkS View Post
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.
I've had mine running for about 9-10 months with no issue. The enclosure is fresh and the plants are still healthy and growing, through I'm using pretty resilient ones like dracaenas. Snake is approaching 900g so we'll see how it does when she's full size, but I don't anticipate any big problems. I do spot clean feces and urates, which I think is necessary to some extent for any larger animal in a bioactive set-up.