Planted Kitty Litter Exo Terras :)

[charoozz520]

So after finally going to NE herpetoculture and walking away with a tray full of Plants, I finally motivated myself to finish the four exo terras tanks I had. This is the first time I used kitty litter as a BG and it came out pretty good surpringly. The tanks has no residents yet but I am hoping to pick up some frogs locally or at the White Plains Expo next week

12" x 12" x 18"


18" x 18" x 18"



24" x 18" x 18"




24" x 18" x 24"

[StickyTongues]

Great looking Vivs! Can you please explain the kitty litter bg? I haven't heard of that one yet. Do you have any pics of the process? I guess i'm going to google kittly litter bg now. Looks like i'll have to pull another all nighter on the forums again researching threads.....lol

[charoozz520]

Pretty much what I use are dr. elsey's precious cat litter from petsmart (around $14 for a 40lb bag) mix it with some peat moss and water and viola it's like playdough and you can just slap it onto the glass. So far it works really well. I don't have pictures of the process but here's a video where it shows how the background is put on:

Building a vertical tank for arboreal dart frogs - YouTube

Building a vertical tank for arboreal dart frogs - YouTube

[fieldnstream]

Kitty Litter is the debil....even more so than fooseball

[StickyTongues]

Does the litter mixture get hard? how does it hold up to the high humidity?

[fieldnstream]

Originally Posted by StickyTongues

how does it hold up to the high humidity?

Just a small sampling of the many posts about humidity+kitty litter:

Clay fail

Clay failure

clay fail

[skylsdale]

As much as I hate to rain on the parade...I can only concur with Field on the above posts. After a couple months of constant humidity, my experience is that the clay just begins to peel and fall off the side of the glass. It was a pain to clean out a 4x2x3' case in which I had used all bentonite clay for the background. Very frustrating.

However, if you take it SLOW and don't keep it too humid, and allow moss to overtake it and included some other materials in the mix...it might be okay.

[charoozz520]

I have also read post where a clay wall have kept up for 3 years, I don't plan on adding a drip wall or a water feature onto the background so it should be okay. Will see how it works out I actually had these tanks for about a month already unplanted and the clay had only crack where I didn't keep it humid enough and that's the top areas before I covered it.

[fieldnstream]

The problem I ran into was where the condensation from the glass lid dripped onto the clay. First small chunks started to come loose, then as the clay became over-saturated, whole slabs slid down. Eventually both sides collapsed, luckily no frogs were caught under the clayvalanche. I was ticked too because I was getting really attractive moss growth.

[frogface]

I've had my kitty litter tanks set up for a couple years now. I love it.

I don't have an auto misting system though. Just a hand sprayer. The clay helps keep things nice and humid.