Soo… to continue the story about the lizards I started earlier. The weekend after July 4th I took another camping trip up to Pine Flat. The fishing was average at best, but the lizarding was fantastic. Over the period of a single day and a half I ended up catching 5 Western Fence Lizards, 3 California Skinks, 3 Garter Snakes, and 1 Alligator Lizard. I took 3 of the Fence Lizards, 2 Skinks, 1 Alligator Lizard, and 2 Garter Snakes home.

Due to the amount of reptiles I caught, my cousin gave me her 135 Gallon Aquarium. The thing was a bitch to move honestly. Just me and my girlfriend moved it from the cousin’s house into my apartment. My apartment on the second floor. Unfortunatly it was about 400 pounds so that was pretty painful and akward, but we got it going and all set up. At this point is when I started burning cash due to the inexperience of setting one of these things up.

Read on to find out everything that happened during the setup, as well as see more videos of all the inhabitants.

I headed to the pet store and picked up a waterfall with a pump, about 60 pounds of brown calcium lizard sand, and another 35 pound bag of white lizard sand. This is where things started to go wrong. The original idea was to have a lake at the left side of the terrarium so I set it up so there was a ton of sand on the left side of the terrarium with a area set up for a lake on the right side, with the waterfall on the right corner.

As soon as I started poring water in though is when things started to go really bad really fast. The calcium lizard sand did not act like normal sand, but like a sponge almost. The second water hit it it absorbed it and the water shot through the sand. So every ounce of the sand absorbed water, all the way to the far left side of the terrarium. Above the 60 pounds of brown sand was the white lizard sand, which had the exact opposite properties of the brown sand. The white sand does NOT absorb water at all, in fact it fucking FLOATS on water, or bunches up into white balls of gunk that sit at the bottom until toched, at which point they burst to the surface and cover the water with a layer of sand.

At this point it was decided that I needed to start over. I had to dig out all the sand and scrape the brown sand from the bottom of the terrarium and garbage it. This next time I planned it a bit better and ended up going down to Lowes. Bought almost 500 pounds of kids playground sand. Which was about 3$ for every 50 pounds. Since I forgot to mention it, the calcium sand was about 14$ for every 10 pounds, and 50$ for the 35 pound bag.

The playground sand ended up MUCH more reasonable. From here the base was set up. The lake formed, and so on. On top of the playground sand I put another bag of the white sand. Then to the middle of the terrerium I put some bark and such to lead towards the lake area to absorb some of the moisture and create an area the skinks like to burrow in. Filled up the lake and this time it worked much better. Since there was so much playground sand, the lake level was able to be deep enough to allow me to put a nice filter/pump. With the filter and pump in there I am able to actually put fish, and have even put in some plants. Currently I just have some guppies, comet minnows, and gold fish, but all of them have managed to live for 2 weeks without a single death. (Other than the guppies that have been ate by who knows what.)

With everything going so well I have actually bought a few lizards and such as well. Here are some quick videos of what I have put into the terrarium.

Fire-bellied Toad

Baby Basilisk (Jesus Lizard) and Baby Water Dragon Sleeping Together

The Basilisk is also known as a Jesus Lizard due to how it will run from predators right across the surface of water if it is frightened enough. When I went to buy this, initially I thought it was very slow. It looked like a skinny Iguana. But as soon as the store employee went to grab it the thing FLEW. Another employee actually came up and said you getting the crazy one for him ?

Baby Bearded Dragon and Adult Male Western Fence Lizard

This bearded dragon I picked up 3 days ago for about 70$. It is the last lizard I am actually going to buy for the terrarium. Currently it is very tiny, but they get quite large. They are also very friendly, personably lizards that get along well with people.

Alligator Lizard

This fella is my favorite lizard. I was stoked as heck when I found him out at the lake, though initially I was a bit afraid to catch it also. I ended up taking off my shirt and grabbing it with the shirt, since these things can bite extremly hard. Fortunatly Male Alligator lizards tame very easily. Within 3 days he no longer bites, will eat from my hand, and will chill on almost anyones shoulder. As you can see from the video he is an adult, and is quite large actually. In the terrarium he has made himself a den under the large shelter. One of the snakes goes in there with him.

Luckily the tank is so large there there are no conflicts with anything really. As you can see from some of the videos, some of the lizards actually get along extremly well. The only issues I have had really are when two things go for the same food at the same time. The two skinks will fight for crickets, and bite each others mouths, and I had one instance where a Fence Lizard Ate a Cricket, and while the cricket was in its mouth the Alligator ate the entire head of the Fence Lizard, at which point it dropped the cricket and bolted. Other than that, all is going good. Hopefully as things get larger it stays that way. The Basilisk will grow up to 3 feet, and the bearded dragon will get up to 2 feet I believe. The snakes will never get too large, but deffinetly bigger than they currently are.

Been pretty fun setting all this up and taking care of the pets, but it is going to be one hell of a job whenever I move from this apartment to a house, to move all of this.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 22nd, 2006 at 2:21 am and is filed under Cory, Nature, Personal, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.