Starting a vivarium

Allot will depend upon how much you want to spend. Chances are, no matter where you live, you can find interesting creatures to place in a Vivarium.

With mine, all I did was to use an old tank no one wanted (85 gal. 72"X16X15) and leave it lay on the stand it came with dropping the water down to 6-10" from the bottom (including substrate).

People will look at you like you're crazy when you begin, especially if you convert an existing tank. That is until nightfall when the moonlights and fogger come on and the Vivarium takes on a sort of primeval mood of lost days when the dinosaurs roamed... there I go again...

If the Moderators don't mind and they give me a small space, over the course of the next couple of weeks I could break open my CAD program (Rhinoceros 3D) and show you how to construct one from scratch, then do another from and existing tank.

Using a CAD program will allow me to demonstrate with pictures but not have to invest in any materials in order to show you how its done. Of course I can post some pictures of some of the materials I have laying around like Aquarium Silly-cone and some tools, but the CAD program has rendering engines for photo-realistic image creation...

It would take me a couple of weeks to do it in my spare time - I'm preparing to build a solar chimney in the back yard to relieve the electric bills.... but when I'm ready, I think the pictorial might be helpful.

While the purist will always use real plants, artificial plants work quite well unless the ground creatures you are interested in showing are exotic bugs which depend upon plants to live on.

Just remember to think about the future when frogs and newts and fish Oh my! get bigger. I know frogs will eat anything they can fit in their mouths. I have personally watched a taod eat a young garter snake. So if you have frogs make sure to get frogs that won't get too big and eat your salamanders or newts if you have them together. Even spotted frogs can get pretty big over time. Tree frogs would probably be a good idea. Fiddler crabs would probably be a good addition as they will help keep the vivarium clean, but there is always the probability of them injuring it's tank mates in self defense, real or imagined. Newts and fish could be kept together depending on the fish size. Having some smaller feeder fish could help protect them.

I think the best way to populate your vivarium is like you would your tank. Think about who will spend most of their time in the water, out of the water, on the upper layer of the tank (tree frogs). Then think about the feeding requirements. Decide whether you want everything to eat about the same thing or whether you don't mind the feeding several diff. foods for each diff. species. Sorry I started to ramble. I have stopped myself writing a pamplet as a response.