Self Sustaining System

[Biology]

Oh didnt answer your question, yea mine follows the specifications set up in the Linhoff paper.

haha ok off topic but my H. versicolor will NOT stop calling right now! hurry up and amplex!

[Nighsliv]

I think you would need a much bigger tank to try and setup this kind of system. It needs to be big enough that the apex predator can roam around and encounter pray in different areas else the prey will just die out too fast.
Problem with doing terrestrial versus aquatic in a closed setup is that terrestrial usually need more surface area (I.e. Larger foot print) than an aquatic habbitat since they can use the full space filled with water.
Also waste from a land based animals are generally harder to filter than from fish, need a lot more bugs to break it down.

So yes it would be possible but need a lot of space per chain you want in your eco system.

[edward]

That is some good advice and definitely something to keep in mind.

I was thinking about having a tank that is more tall than long. With some careful construction, lots of shelves/overhands/etc could be created for the terrestrial space and make much more efficient use of the volume, although still not as good as aquatic portion of the enclosure.

I understand what you are saying about the prey dieing off too quickly but I think that if the available cover is carefully planned that it may work. If there is enough cover for the prey species that they dont have to be exposed much, I think they would have a decent chance of surviving.

[Biology]

I would start with out even having a predator. I would try to find something thats diet is very flexible i.e. Omnivorous, eats scarsly or can go a long time with out food but yea nighslev I totally agree. I would to only 2 or 3 trophic levels though much better chance of it not crashing.

I do like the fruit fly idea that could be fun to mess around with....

[beckdg]

i think having backup setups would really increase your chances of success also. if you could eliminate a trophic level by housing elsewhere for a period before another level is killed off they can rebound. theorhetically a system that lasts one year enclosed could possibly go indefinite this way.

[viva la viv]

You know one thing that is really never mentioned about paludarium start up is cycling of the water, just like a fish tank it will go through a cycling period this got me when i set mine up, with too much plants it used up all the amonia and the filter was slow to get a bacteria build up so when i added fish the sudden spike of fish waste caused the tank to re-cycle and the amonia to spike. Thankfully i was testing regularly and it was noticed so some of the fish were taken out a put back in the quarintine tank. adding a couple handfulls of gravel or sand to the water and dirt from a established tank will help. This may be irrelavent to this post though as i did hear mention of not using a filter at all?

[*Self_DeFenCe*]

Hysterocrates gigas is a tarantula that is kept in the hobby because they can hunt underwater. Get a female and you won't have the problem of a hundred slins caught in a small tank. Females survive long enough you'll be tired of having that paludarium.

[defiantNX]

i was tinkering with the idea of getting some hysterocrates gigas. I have read that they are also communal but I dont know if they would do well in a paludarium because they also like to dig.

This entire situation reminds me slightly of the Jurassic Park book. They had to make a bunch of scavenger dinosaurs to control the waste from the larger dinosaurs. Maybe your predator could be a tree frog. The tadpoles would help control algae in the water section and certain tree frogs have been known to eat fish so that would help control the population. If you get a small species of tree frog, they could eat fruit flies instead of needing larger insects for food.

[rudukai13]

You know if you focused simply on the aquatic inhabitants, you could probably get this to work using guppies and a slighlty larger predatory fish. I know that quite a few fish would feed on the guppy fries but leave the adult guppies alone, and if you had enough male and female guppies in the tank at one time they should breed often enough to sustain a supply of guppy fry for the slightly larger predatory fish. After that it's just taking into concern how you sustain the adult guppies...

[frasertheking]

im not sure if fish would work they seem a bit high up the foodchain.

im not sure i that spider eats shrimp but id think a tank with as big a foot print as possible would be best no matter what.

id think if you created a kind of false bottom in the water so that shrimp can pass between the layers but the spider could not. something like egg crate, then light the water area from the side so algea and plants can grow under the land section which would feed the shrimp and possibly snails to help break down the rubbish.

then create the entire over water section as land but with a pond for the spider to access,

so you basicly have a layerd food chain

shrimp feed and breed in the lower section, then some will wonder into the pond section in which the shrimp can pass into by chance

the entire above water section could be land bar the access hole for the pond
then you have some kind of substrate over the land that helps the microfauna

so youd have the entire water footprint for breeding shrimp with the algea and plants
and the land section taking almost the entire foot print bar the pond

so your foodchain would go

algea grows, shrimp eat and breed and break down plant material , while microfauna feed and break down land waist matter, the spider eats the shrimp / microfauna ,


then all wiast materials broken down work into the soil or the water table to be reused by the plants and the water algeas

im sure non of that makes any sense so just ask haha