Hello all, my name is Cas and I am so excited to finally find people to talk to about reptiles, amphibians, bugs, and pretty much every other creature that usually gets you a side-eye out in public!
I have adored snakes and lizards and other creepy-crawlies my entire life, and after several disappointing false starts and extreme life-altering upheavals, I am finally in a situation where I can comfortably pursue my true interests. To the shock and disbelief of everyone I know (myself included), I am now a homeowner!! I intend to surround myself with every beautiful creature I have admired from afar, and now nobody can stop me!
At this point in time I am keeping a decent amount of tarantula slings and juvies and not much else, but now that my living situation is permanent that will definitely be changing! I have some well-seasoned bioactive vivariums that have been growing out very nicely and I think that I will be ready to add reed frogs to them soon.
Beyond that I am still just dreaming and planning on how best to utilize my new space. Definitely searching for good shelving suggestions for lots and lots of inverts! I’m sure I’ll be on here pretty often looking for enclosure advice for pretty much everything under the sun, and maybe along the way I can make some like-minded friends as well.
Thanks for your time, here’s a pic of one of my C. fimbriatus juvies!
Welcome bug under leaf! You will really like it here I think! Lots of keepers and breeders of all sorts of slithery crawly creeping critters! Just grab some popcorn, a soda and a seat among the many and join in any time.
That’s a super cool little velvet you have there. I keep a few T’s myself!
Welcome! Congrats on the home ownership, that’s awesome! I’ve pretty much accepted that I will never own a home, but I can very much relate to the wonderful feeling of finally being at a place in your life when you’re able to pursue interests you previously didn’t have the money and/or stability to pursue. I was finally able to start getting some snake and spider species I’d wanted for years about 4-5 years ago, it’s been great.
While I don’t own my condo, I do rent it from my mother. So if she ever raises an eyebrow about my pets, I just tell her that she raised me, so she really has no one to blame but herself.
I completely understand the feeling that you won’t ever own your own home. Truly it was a complete shock that I was able to do so, my dad recently died and left me some money that I didn’t even know he had. We lived well below the poverty line my whole life, it still brings tears to my eyes thinking about how he was secretly saving what little he had for his kids and how hard he must’ve had to work for it.
Your mom sounds great, mine would have killed me if I tried bringing a snake or spider into the house! What kinds of snakes do you have? Is there anything that you really want but don’t have right now?
I’m sorry you lost your dad, though I’m sure he’d be happy to know that his hard work and saving are making his kids’ lives easier now.
I have a Kenyan sand boa, a blood python, and a boa constrictor (imperator), plus 6 spiders (5 tarantulas plus a black widow). While there are loads of other species I want, I fear I’m about at capacity for now, at least for the snakes. I live with a housemate who’s terrified of snakes and spiders, so I have to fit everything in my bedroom, so space is very limited. I desperately want a false water cobra, but so far I haven’t figured out how to fit another big enclosure in here. Sometimes I ask myself if I really need a bed, because that sucker is taking up valuable floor space.
What species are you thinking of adding in the future?
Oh man, what species I DON’T want would be a much shorter list! What I will say is that at this time I am at least partially set up for reed frogs, vietnamese mossy frogs, bumblebee toads, chameleon geckos (haven’t decided which species yet!), garter snakes, and a LOT more inverts. I was allowed to keep my “indoor gardens” at the old rental so long as there weren’t any live animals in there, so I have lots of seasoned enclosures that are nice and grown in! What I’m lacking right now is mostly proper UVB and heat, and I am currently hand misting so I’d love to set up a misting system before I really go nuts with the amphibians. Beyond that, I would LOVE to work with false water cobras, beauty snakes, and african house snakes. I recently saw some gorgeous sphaerodactylus species on MM and fell in love with those too. My partner has vetoed any snakes big enough to need two people to handle (fair enough) but I’m hoping a sd retic may be in my future as well! I love the intelligence of monitors and am kinda drawn towards the Kimberley Rocks, but that will be a long long way off I think.
Congrats on the opportunity to go all in on a wild “you never know what’s happening inside the home” build.
I see you already have a thread up to start that adventure and I hope to see some fun things happening in the future there. Hahah
It’s also neat to seemore inverts pop up. I admire them here because my housemate has really bad arachnophobia. So thank you for sharing!
Thank you! I’m very excited to expand my invert collection. My partner HATES spiders but we’ve been working on that lol. So far one shelf stacked full of slings and two more shelves of juvie enclosures, but I’m hoping to get ahold of some mantis species soon. I kept an injured wild adult to the end of his lifespan a few years back and he was pretty neat. He got hit by a weed whipper and it was pretty gnarly but he lived till the end of summer and ate pretty well while he was with me, very cool experience! The tiny instars freak me out a little because my last two fruit fly cultures have crashed and I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong with those just yet.
