Just picked up three of these, all with that beautiful rock scaping in the back free off of craigslist. I don’t have any real plans for them, just couldn’t pass up something this cool for free. All they need is a little cleaning and some painting and they’re good to go. Might be awhile before I actually do something with them, but any cool ideas for what to keep in them, or how to scape them? I’m getting a more arid, or just generally dryer vibe from them personally. It’d have to be something fairly small too, they measure 24 x 12 x 12. So, any ideas of something interesting to keep in them?
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What a steal honestly. What type of critters are you into? When I think of small arid enclosures I typically think of smaller desert species of lizards/geckos, or maybe arid environment inverts. Scorpions would definitely look cool in a setup like that
Or honestly if you want to pull off a temperate or tropical look maybe some terrestrial tarantulas might fit.
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Don’t have any experience with inverts really, wouldn’t say I’m all too interested in keeping them either. Except for maybe blue death feigning beetles. Been looking at a few gecko species in the past few hours, namely viper geckos and western banded geckos. Definitely interested in those. How would a pygmy python do in a setup like this? That’d definitely take longer to acquire, and be a little pricey, but it’s a species I’ve been interested in for a while. I tend to be mostly a (non-ball) python and mid-sized lizard guy, so I’d have to think a bit more about if I would really want to get little geckos. Alternatively, I could just scape it and plant it like a beautiful desert mountainside and then call it a day and not put any creatures in it.
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Those might be a nice fit 
I don’t really know much about Pygmy Pythons at all so I don’t really know if it would fit the enclosure or not… Maybe someone else might 
Don’t believe Pygmy pythons would be a fit.
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Yeah looking them up briefly I can tell they would need something much larger. It could probably work for a baby until it is a juvie but they’d need a much larger enclosure as an adult.
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Yeah, figured as much, worth checking.
The most recent standards I’ve seen floating around for corn snakes is at least a 4 x 2 x 2. I’d probably wanna go with that if I did get one. Who knows, might get one in the future, not opposed. I think the next snake I’m gonna get though is gonna be a western king of some sort, probably gray banded or Arizona mountain.
Maybe a nuveo leon kingsnake? Or Durango Mountain Kingsnake?
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The shallow litter dams on Neodesha make them less than ideal for semi-tropic/tropic setups as you would not have sufficient media depth for hunidity and planting requirements. That said, the do work well enough for arid setup that require less depth. The arid species of Coleonyx would probably do alright in a setup like that. Heteronotia binoei would as well and they tend to be better as a colony type species
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Any idea of the typical temperaments of bynoe’s geckos, viper geckos, and Coleonyx? I’ll also add pictus geckos onto that. I don’t have much issue with defensive or food aggressive species (I do have a young carpet python after all lol), but what I don’t like dealing with is species that are too skittish or likely to jump out of my hands and scurry away. That’s why I usually prefer medium sized lizards and snakes, less risk there. I could do a smaller lizard though as long as they’re not too fast and skittish.
Not an established law of nature but smaller species will pretty much always be more skittish… When you do not have size on your side the best option is to run like wind and/or bite like a piranha (ask me why I do not handle my kukri snakes)
When I kept Coleonyx I treated them as more display animals, only removing them if there was a health matter (like stuck shed on a foot or the like). I never handled them, they are generally too fragile to be doing that on the regular
My binoei are all still very young (maybe 5cm total length) so that puts them quite firmly in the “look but do not touch” category as well
I have never owned viper or Pictus geckos so I cannot speak from experience there, but given their overall size and tempramant, I personallu would also err on the side of not handling them
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