Naturalistic tarantula vivarium questions.

[Emperornibble]

I am in the planning stage of building a 60 gal (2ft) cube for Ghost ornamental tarantulas and have some questions....

I am trying for a very primitive looking vivarium with mushrooms, mosses, liverworts and lycopodiums. I have in mind that I will be using an oak stump as the centerpiece with various smaller pieces of locally found wood. It will have no water feature, so no false bottom is needed. I will be collecting the liverworts and some mosses and lichens that naturally occur in high humidity and warm temps near my home. I will be collecting the soil, wood and quite a bit of the plants for it from the same location, a local creek, to give it the most natural look i can.

I am guessing it will have a pretty steep incline from front to back, I am hoping to have the soil come to within a few inches of the top and be a few inches deep at the front. So there will be about 1.5 ft of vertical rise.

So my first question is what kind of substrate should I use for the bottom of the tank? It will have no water feature and the soil will be moist but not wet. Will gravel work?

As for the wood I've read that you should quarantine it in a plastic container and allow it to dry out for at least a month to let any creatures living in the wood die. As for fungi in the wood I could care less, considering its what I'm actually going for and drying it out wont kill fungus off completely anyway. Any suggestions?

What kind of lighting should i use that will be good for the primitive plants?

I also have a question about sporing plants out of sphagnum moss. I have seen it done with wondrous results. Does this work with all sphagnum mosses? I am in the process of trying to spore plants out of 3 different types of sphagnum, 2 varieties of ground up peat moss and long grain sphagnum. Any tips or experience with this concept please let me know...

[beckdg]

you could boil, bake or even co2 treat the wood.

6500k full spectrum bulbs should be fine... or something close.

i may be crazy, but if you don't over water you might get away with no drainage layer. ime drainage layers have given me a false sense of security leading to over watering and stagnant bottoms that need to be siphoned. i would rather a soil to utilize capilary action to wick that excess back up than go through that personally. i'm sure others will disagree.

there's a writeup that was done in the last week or so about culturing your own mushrooms from spores. i think the original poster was vivweaver. you could look into that.

[Epiphile]

That sounds like a great project- I really like the idea of using simple, primitive plants and fungi.

I haven't tried them, but I believe that a lot of Lycopodium are tricky, and some of them require higher light- I'd read as much as you can before trying them out. If you're buying them they're often expensive plants to lose.

Just a thought here- I might suggest a clay-based substrate if you wanted it to hold shape well enough for a 45 degree angle. I would think that your plants would enjoy it as well. Here's a thread on the subject: http://www.dendroboard.com/forum/gen...te-thread.html

[beckdg]

aaron... what do you think of adding clay to the substrate yourself? i know i use red mexican clay and some powdered ferts to make root tabs for my fish tanks. i was actually thinking that amending some soil with that and sand might be a great idea for tarantulas for burrowing purposes.

i'm thinking put ~4 parts clay and 1 part water into a container while you amend the soil with sand. once that's done you can mix your now softer clay in also. let dry to desired consistency and you should have something perfect for burrowing.

[Epiphile]

To be perfectly honest I haven't tried this one yet (and I probably should have said as much). Still, I don't see why a mix like that wouldn't work with a little experimentation to get the ratios right. According to some of the information presented in the DB thread above, though, you run the risk of making mush.

[Emperornibble]

Anything about sporing liverworts and such out of moss? That's where I'm really stuck.

[Emperornibble]

Originally Posted by beckdg

you could boil, bake or even co2 treat the wood.

I am really worried about killing off any kind of mycelium that is in the wood, since I'm trying to grow mushrooms. And drying it out will kill it but it will come back really fast. But baking it would destroy it for good.

I put a peice of wood in my latest tank after it sat dry for almost 2 years and with in 24 hours the mycelium was starting to take over and with in a week I had small mushrooms sprouting all over it.

Would co2 treatment kill of the mycelium? I know it will inhibit the growth, which is why you must vent the tank or fan it often to keep the co2 down as it is a bi product of mushroom growth.

which is another reason I want the liverworts and such to take off since they process co2 for photosynthesis.

[Emperornibble]

Originally Posted by beckdg

aaron... what do you think of adding clay to the substrate yourself? i know i use red mexican clay and some powdered ferts to make root tabs for my fish tanks. i was actually thinking that amending some soil with that and sand might be a great idea for tarantulas for burrowing purposes.

i'm thinking put ~4 parts clay and 1 part water into a container while you amend the soil with sand. once that's done you can mix your now softer clay in also. let dry to desired consistency and you should have something perfect for burrowing.

That might be a good idea since the place I'm going to collect the soil from sits atop a layer of Pleistocene clay and there is a thick river deposit of sand and gravel of the same geological age sitting atop that. Interestingly there is cretaceous shark and bony-fish teeth and Pleistocene rodent bones in the sand/gravel deposit. which will be cool since I have been thinking of putting a fossil bison horn in there too, which was collected in the same stretch of creek. It would be like a slice of the creek in my tank...

[Epiphile]

Originally Posted by Emperornibble

Anything about sporing liverworts and such out of moss? That's where I'm really stuck.

Do you mean growing stuff that sprouts spontaneously from sphagnum? I would guess that either live or dried longfiber would work, and perhaps the milled stuff as well. You may not get anything from the peat moss, but I could be wrong there, too.

I've never really heard of this before, but I kept sphagnum alive for a little while and had little seedlings and stuff popping up here and there- I don't know what they were.

[Epiphile]

Actually, I just read something interesting- apparently a guy trying to grow moss on a bed of peat moss actually had sphagnum sprouting from the peat. So there you go- spore can be pretty tough, I guess.