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Terrarium Tour

I got a request to post another little tour so I took some shots today since I won't be leaving the house with 12" + of snow and the roads all closed. This isn't everything just a peek at some of the bigger setups.

Here's the main Geosesarma sp. Red Vampire Crab jungle it's a 40 gallon tank with about 3 pairs of adult crabs and several broods of various sized babies anywhere from hatchlings to 1/2" in size.

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Crab Pond #1 (left side)
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Crab Pond #2 (right side)
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This is a 10 gallon tank setup as a vertical with a mossy wall where I put a pair of the red crabs they dug tunnels all through the wall (they love to climb) they recently had their first litter of babies in here.

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Here is a mat of Riccia where the baby crabs have been molting, you can see the clear empty molts on the right and left and part of a freshly molted baby down on the bottom in the middle trying to hide.

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Here's a baby crab on land, I don't know when they start to get their shocking red color, for now they are the same color as wet peat so I put a red arrow to indicate where to look
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This is another 10 gallon crab tank, I only have one female crab in here, I have to catch a male for her out of the big tank if I ever see one.

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This is another 10 gallon vertical with a black violin mantis in it, most are tan

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Here's the black violin mantis

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Here's the tan Violin mantis (in a different terrarium)

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This tank is just plants

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My Utrics, N. jacquelinae and N. jamban

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Lowland Neps

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The cloud at the top is the Avicularia avicularia tarantulas house

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gratuitous kitty shots:

Anna
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Flash

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........Your terrariums have rendered me speechless......:0o:
 
you make a mighty terra. :0o:
 
Purrty cats
And your terarriums are amazing.
 
Crab and mantis heaven!

... I would advise against keeping the cats in the terrariums though. I think they like more space than that.
 
Looks better than most zoos terrariums.
 
Thanks guys! I still have about 6 more tanks that need decorating & planting, there's a 37 gallon sliding front cube, a 56 gallon cube aquarium (which can be made into a sliding front), two 20 highs made into sliding front verticals and a couple more 10 verticals that are unused.

I'd like to do an "all rock & mud bank" setup for raising the baby crabs with a waterfall, moss and lithophytes it would make them easier to spot and catch for people as they grow. I'm going to carve the rocks and rock walls out of foam and cover them in floor patch cement paste or portland cement. I'd like to do that in a sliding front 55 gallon though so that means another tank to buy & modify next time petco has a tank sale... :D

The cats are let out of their terrariums if they're good! LOL
 
... wow. :drool:

Nicely done sir, just amazing!
 
  • #10
very cool......thinking bout what i want to do for some tanks......have wood soaking now.......
 
  • #11
Geez. Those are all so cool. I really commend you on breeding those crabs, it's good to see things like that going on.
Those violin mantis... I have never seen one of those... WILD. Really impressive.

You have a lot of terrariums. What are you going to do with them all? You should start a terrarium zoo and charge entrance fees! :-))
 
  • #12
Beautiful terrariums. What do you feed your crabs?
 
  • #14
Oh.
My.
God.
Those are absolutely...amazing.
:hail:
 
  • #15
Wow...simply amazing. Beautiful, beautiful work.
 
  • #16
swords, honestly, I deeply envy your skill in scaping. I've tried my hand at it with a few terrariums and vivariums, and I have a lot of fun with it and love doing it, but man... those are... incredible. Very well done. You have a very skilled hand in capturing the raw beauty of nature, even in something as small as a ten gallon, and that is no easy feat. Something you should be hugely proud of. Thanks for sharing and, more so, inspiring.
 
  • #17
Thanks guys- I'm long overdue for some pruning and maintenance on all of them! :blush:

This is an old pic but just incase some of you haven't seen the Red Vampire Crabs before and wanna know what the adults look like here's a full grown male who is 2" wide (leg tip to leg tip) :
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Females look the same but with skinnier claws. They carry a brood of 20 eggs on their abdomen for a month or so until they hatch. Some of the roughly 90 species of Geosesarma crabs will carry their babies around on their backs for several weeks like Dart Frogs do, but this unidentified red species does not seem to offer any parental care at all.

They are scavenger/predators so they will eat almost anything - but they don't seem to like fruits or veggies, they will pick at certain algae and moss but not enough to eat it all. I feed them a rotation of: live calcium dusted fruit flies and small crickets, dead large crickets, shrimps and mealworms, defrosted blood worms, tropical color fish flakes and crushed dry oak leaves. I put a "giant" species of springtail and orange isopods in all the vivariums as clean up crew and these get eaten before long in the crab tanks. The baby crabs go for the springtails and the adults go after the orange isopods. I've seen adult crabs walking around with one orange pod in each claw not able to decide which one to eat first! LOL

I'm hoping the captive born babies will be calmer and out more than the wild caught adults. I bought part of a one-time import last spring that reptile book author Philippe deVosjili made with a SE Asian exotics firm. All we know is they are caught from a stream in Sulawesi where the crabs go to bathe and molt because finding them in the jungle would prove nearly impossible! The adults are so skittish I almost never see them except from across the room about 15 minutes after putting food in their tank and they come out to investigate the new smell. They seem to have amazing eyesight because I can be across the room and lift my camera, extend the zoom and that sends them bolting for the nearest hole. Only once rather soon after arrival was I able to hand feed one of the males a large cricket with the feeding tongs. Now that they have their territories and burrows claimed they don't come out too often other than at dinner time or early in the morning before the lights come on they take a dip. Some Europeans who keep them constantly re-arrange their tanks which causes them to have to re-establish burrows and then you get to see them more often but I don't agree with disturbing them needlessly and the plants wouldn't go for it either.
 
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