I’ve had anole lizards as pets for about 15 years now. The setup I’ve always used is:
-30 gal. glass tank
-UV light
-Several varieties of fake plants
-grapevine and driftwood
-bedding made of recycled coconut husks
This setup has always worked fine for both myself and the lizards. They’re healthy and as happy as a lizard can be. But the problem with this has always been cleaning time. To clean the terrarium, I have to catch the lizards and put them in a spare tank (they don’t like this), then take out all the decorations and soak them in hot water to get the poo off of everything. Dump out the bedding, clean the walls of the tank with a natural disenfectant. Take the decorations out of the water, dry them. Put new bedding in, put decorations back in, put lizards back in. Now this works just fine, but I’m getting sick of it because 1)The lizards don’t like to be handled, so it’s stressful for them and 2) It takes about 2 hours to do all of this.
Now, I was wondering, if I were to use soil instead of the other bedding and supply rooted, live plants, would excretions, dead insects, etc. break down naturally in the soil, possibly eliminating or reducing the need to clean the terrarium? I’d like to try it, but only if it’s safe for my lizards. Any knowledge/experience on this?
It’s possible, after all, that’s pretty much what a natural environment does, however, I think the chief issue is probably minimum sustainable size; in a tank of that size, it’s very likely that:
-the population density (of the species you’re interested in - the lizards) would be considerably higher than it would be in nature.
-the diversity of other species will be nowhere near as rich
-the capacity to store and redistribute substances/materials would be limited.
It’s certainly possible to create a balanced small-scale ecosystem that is sustainable for a surprisingly long time; indeed it is possible to buy sealed ‘biospheres’ containing water, live shrimp and plants; balance being formed by the population of one being dependent on the other. But generally speaking, the more complex the creatures you want to keep, the broader will be their requirements and the harder it will be to sustain balance.
I’d imagine that for a reasonably self-sustaining lizard environment, you’d be looking at something the size of a greenhouse and upwards, with quite sparse population.
Having said all that, there might still be real benefits to using live plants and real soil - I think you’ll still have to clean it out periodically, but maybe not so often (of course the job of cleaning it out becomes a considerably more complex task).
Another aspect of this that probably should not be ignored is whether such an environment would facilitate the presence of diseases and pests that would be harmful to your lizards.
Yes. To approach the stability of a natural system, you’d have to approach the scale of a natural system. Keep in mind that even as your artificial ecosystem increases in size–up to greenhouse size–it’s still sealed in glass and is cut off from the larger ecosystem of Nature.
As an aquarium geek who got into it for the science, not for the purty fish, one of my holy grails was a self sustaining aquarium. Until I had an epiphany one day. I was practicing a kind of thought experiment, trying to figure out what the difference was between a balanced ecosystem, like a pond, and an ecosystem that requires artificial support, like an aquarium. I imgagined a larger and larger aquarium, then I imagined it in a forest glen, like where you might find a pond, and eureka, I saw that the aquarium was still cut off from interactions with the natural ecosystem by tempered glass.
You’ve taken the animals out of their natural environment and put them in an artificial environment. Being artificial, it requires artificial support. There is really almost no way around this, besides the extremely exceptional anomolies like those little shrimp globes, which you may notice never contain a goldfish or an octopus, only one very specific species of shrimp. Won’t work for your anoles.
(I was able to establish aquariums that needed very, very little maintenance, but ultimately, when you take a section out of nature and seal it in a box of glass, you have to step in at some point. I had an aquarium client once who was a urologist. He said one of this patients asked him why he needed me to come by and perform maintenance on the tank, when it had a filter? I blinked, thinking, this guy’s a urologist. I said, “Why should you need to pee? You have a kidney.”)
To expand further; you could almost certainly build a self-sustaining, more-or-less enclosed system, on quite a small scale too, I would imagine. The problem arises almost entirely when you want to exercise choice about its appearance and the species with which it will be stocked.
If we were to create any number of sealed glass containers of (say) average greenhouse capacity, filled initially with soil, water and random mixes of plants and small animals (perhaps even including small vertebrates and revisit them a decade later, I would wager that almost none of them would actually be completely sterile; many of them would probably contain nothing much more interesting than bacteria and algae; a few would probably have surviving vascular plants; fewer still might additionally have some sustained populations of invertebrates and… maybe… just maybe… a very tiny proportion would have chanced to favour the survival of plants, invertebrates and some kind of vertebrate life (all descendants of the original populations, of course - I’m not talking about spontaneous generation).
Very few, I would think, would have completely dead, but also very few would be anything that humans might describe as aesthetically pleasing.
You can maintain a couple of anoles almost indefinitely without cleaning if you set up your terrarium as follows.
Start with about two inches of pea gravel. This is natural gravel, rounded stones about a quarter to a half inch in size. Then add about two inches of potting soil. Then add some plants which like fairly wet roots. I’ve used Pothos. Then set up the rest of the tank however you like.
Daily, or at least several times a week, spray the inside of the tank, especially where your anoles have pooped, with a spray bottle of water. This will cause the waste to seep into the soil and gravel substrate, where the plant roots and bacteria will process it and use it.
I have maintained and bred poison dart frogs for years in tanks like this without changing the substrate.
To avoid putting too much of a burden on this system, you should do your best to remove any uneaten food items (dead bugs) from the tank if you can.
Nope. As long as you spray any surfaces where poop may be deposited, the water will carry it into the soil. If you actually see some feces that resists being washed down onto the soil, give it an extra spritz.
As a proud owner of a 55 Gallon fish tank, I’m very curious to know what you did to minimize your upkeep… while I love the fish, I hate cleaning the tank and I am curious about how close one can get to homeostasis.
so, care to share your recipe?
I’ve got the pretty standard setup right now… gravel, filter box on the side…
I had a few live plants, but between a snail explosion we had and some fish which ate the plants (poor upkeep on our part, but we’ve resolved that and now have a regular feeding schedule) they have been pretty beaten up.
It’s a freshwater tank, though we’ve been toying with the idea of adding just a little salt, as we’ve heard a bit of brackishness is good.
Oops, I forgot one important thing. You can do a “housecleaning” on a terrarium like this fairly easily. Do an extra-thorough spraying, enough to fill the bottom of the tank with water up to the top of the gravel layer. Then stick one end of a length of aquarium tubing down into the gravel to the bottom of the tank. Then siphon out as much water as you can. Enough water will remain to maintain the continuity of your bacteria population, but you will have removed a fair amount of accumulated waste products if there are any, and diluted whatever remains.
Good point. One of those squeeze bulbs is safest, but I usually just suck until the water (visible in the tube) reaches the point of no return and then let it loose.
You are welcome. I’d like to add that I meant no contradiction of the answers from Mangetout, lissener, and Seven. I just wanted to share my experience with low-maintenance terrariums. The totally self-sustaining thing is beyond the scope of my knowledge. Good luck with your lizards.
If you’re doing this, make sure you sterilise the tube beforehand, or the bit you’re sticking in your mouth may still be coated with pathogens from last time, even if you don’t actually suck the water too far.
