Wanting to go bioactive

[TofuTofuTofu]

There is a nice post on vivarium lighting at NEherp, but it's quite involved and hard to get through if you don't enjoy reading technical stuff. I will try to just explain what I've done with my environments below.

I have a 6500k, 34" T8 fluorescent bulb in my desert terrarium; the terrarium is 18" high and the light is probably like 12"-14" from my plants as seedlings, getting closer as they grow more. I have it on a 13-hour cycle. That being said, my snake is not moved in there yet.

My husband's Japanese rat snake's enclosure is bioactive, which I set up for him over the summer. The enclosure is 36" x 18" x 24", and the bulb is a 6500k 24" long bulb--I think it's on 12 or 13 hours per day. This enclosure is more like temperate and has mid-range humidity, with spike moss (not a true moss, but Selaginella) as a groundcover as well as some lucky bamboo (not real bamboo either! The weird bamboo-looking plant you can grow in just water that people give as gifts), planted directly into the bioactive soil. The substrate mix was from NEherp too, but I later added worm castings to it because it didn't have the consistency I wanted for these plants. The two plant varieties I mentioned are doing super well in his enclosure and have been growing really well (we do have to trim them). I bought the isopods on eBay, and the springtails just... showed up without us buying any, lol, so they were in the NEherp mix even though we didn't ask for it.

I should mention that, regarding the above, this amount of light isn't stressful to this snake. I don't know if it would bother a snake in another type of setup, but he has a ton of cover in his terrarium. The bamboo obscures a good amount of the light, creating a sort of shaded forest kind of environment. It has a UTH, which I think is kind of useless? But maybe keeps up the humidity in the bottom drainage layer and saves water? I don't know. It is pretty self-sustaining and requires super infrequent watering despite having a mesh top; we water fewer than once per week and the soil stays at an even moisture.

I saw you had pothos, and I think that should be fine in just ambient room lighting. I have a few around my house, and it just probably won't grow much without light, but it shouldn't die. If you're going to put it in his tub (dunno if you have just paper towels or a substrate), maybe you could bunch up a towel or sweatshirt around the plant pot to stabilize it; it would help keep it in place and I find our snakes love soft stuff like fabrics, so it could add enrichment in that way too. And you can just clean and reuse the towel or whatever, and it will help contain any plant moisture or dirt bits from the bottom of the pot? Adding the plant in there wouldn't really help or harm anything, but I think it'd be good enrichment for your snake and also to see how he reacts to it. (I'm assuming a plastic pot? I would hesitate a little about a heavier ceramic pot just in case it gets knocked over and could crush a tail or something)

Oh, and about starting it early: You could start the isopod colony separately. That's what I did before we finished setting up the enclosure. I bought literally like 8 isopods from eBay, got a small shoebox-kind of tub, and made an isopod substrate (you can look up how, but I basically sterilized leaves from my yard, as well as sterilized some worm castings mixed with sand, clay, and coconut coir). Give them scraps like peas, corn, whatever, and they will start reproducing. The springtails, like I said, just happened and we didn't propagate them, but they propagated themselves pretty quickly and are doing fine.

I'm really into growing plants indoors and stuff, so, if you have more questions now or whenever you start setting up yours in the future, feel free to send me a message about it. I only have like a year of experience in bioactive with my desert terrarium, but I've learned a lot and I find them really rewarding! I wouldn't say they are easy, but I only say that because most people can't take care of plants or observe changes. I did not find it challenging for myself, but rather just interesting and fun... But they aren't for everyone, I guess.