500 gallon vivarium, how many frogs?

Terra5 said:

i agree that mold is a good thing. I also agree and enjoyed your post about how it all works...in the real world with sunlight. but in a vivarium
is there enough uv to help the breakdown or is that needed?

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The processes are not light dependent. UV can physically breakdown many compounds but that is not really connected to the biological breakdown. The only difference light makes is that it drives the photosynthesis of the plants which compete with the fungus and bacteria for nutrients.

now, with the waste produced, organic like with some bacteria, and worms - bugs etc versus the in-organic waste or co2. which is better?

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You get both regardless of how it happens. Organic is simply a molecule containing carbon and hydrogen. These are the sugars all the critters use for energy. As they break down organic materials, they take out some of the energy of those sugars and metabolize it which most commonly is respired as CO2 but they also create organic waste which then gets broken down further. So the sugars in the original material get broken down into forms with less and less energy in them until what's left is humic acid which is an organic sugar that has so little energy that almost nothing can live off of it. It lasts for centuries and give the nice loamy texture to forest soils. Now the inorganic CO2 that is respired is, of course, what the plants suck up and use the energy of light to convert back into organic sugars that starts the whole cycle over. You can't really say one is better than the other, they are both part of the process.

I've been etched with the idea of using two sources of micro fauna, pill bugs and bacteria introduction. in smaller systems, outside dirt, but
we're talking about a larger; i don't the square foot size, but even if it where 8'L x 4'W, that's a lot of ground to balance out. how much time before it would be stable - meaning level pH at the soil, heatlhy plant growth through out and stable humidty in the soil?

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What the bugs do is quickly break the organic materials into smaller particles which exposes more surface area for the bacteria and fungi to attach to. This speeds the rate of nutrient turnover so things dissapear faster. They are really nothing more than leaf shredders.

The time taken to stabilize the soil wouldn't be any different for a huge viv as it would for a small one because the system develops on a per unit volume basis. Of course if you seed with invertebrates, it will take longer for them to reach carrying capacity in a larger vivarium unless you seed with more bugs to begin with. But the bugs are such a minor part of the nutrient cycling process that it doesn't matter. The invertebrates aren't really required to stabilize the system but they do make things work more efficiently when they are there.