My Bioactive Arid/Desert Enclosure for Trans-Pecos Rat Snake

[TofuTofuTofu]

DE will become active again when it dries. Generally when you are using it, they recommend reapplying after rain and such because a lot of it gets washed away. I'm not sure if your beetles burrow or not. If not, watering several times might be able to flush enough of it out that the DE can't hurt them.

As far as the bait, from the terro website "The liquid ant bait, whether in our dropper bottle or pre-filled bait stations, does not have an expiration date. The effectiveness of the active ingredient, Borax, does not diminish over time." Given that it's designed so that the ants carry it to their colony, share it with other ants, and poison more of them, I would assume that beetles eating the dead ants could be poisoned as well. If it were me, I'd rather replace the soil that risk killing the beetles. If that is a huge chore and you can be really patient, you could let the ants decompose, and give your plants time to pull some of it out of the soil. Some plants really like boron and do well from supplementing with borax (what terro is made from).

I did water pretty heavily a few times (also to try to discourage the ants from staying), and it was such a small amount, that I don't have a lot of concern about the DE. My beetles dig around the surface of the soil, but do not burrow. However, they do have larvae in the soil (their fate is unknown as of right now, lol)

As for the borax... oof. I think what I'll do is replace as much of the soil as I can. I did make a new batch of soil, so I can probably take out most of the dead ants by just scooping out most of it and replacing it. I can't completely empty out the soil because there are plants rooted in there, but I can take out almost all of it without causing much damage. I wonder about the death-feigning beetle larvae that I saw in there previously. I will remove any I see while doing this and put them back in. I assume most are still in there, unless they already ate some dead ants and died as a result.

Does anyone know if there would have been a better way than using the terro? I want to look into more ant barriers as well, as a preventative measure (although that's what the DE was, and it didn't work 100% because that tiny strip of tape unpeeling gave them a new path)

Sorry to hear about your set-backs, both the snake & the ants invading your set-up. But I'm glad you didn't get the snake first & then find out about the crypto, or have the ants invade once the snake has already moved in. So, it could have been worse...

I agree. I'm glad for my current reptiles that I didn't introduce a new one with an illness, and also glad the ants weren't in there with the snake. I'm wondering what the best way to prevent this in the future is. If I weren't looking at the enclosure every day, it could have been much worse.