[Smotzer]

Hello all, my names Connor! I’m excited to join this community and yet another forum ha!! Thank you in advance to anyone who welcomes me to the community!!

My schooling and trade I am a horticulturist and have many years of experiencing growing and propagating plants and I grow a good deal of terrarium and vivarium plants in addition to all of my focus in caudiciforms I specialize in. I would say I am an experienced terrarium/vivarium/planted-tank builder and regularly make them for displays, for sale, and for the arthropods I keep! I have always thought it would be fun to add some PDF’s to some of my exclosures but wasn’t in a place to dedicate a lot of extra time to a new group of animals, but I think I am finally ready to delve into the world so many of you love! While I don’t have experience with PDF’s yet I hope to be a contributing member in the realm of DIY build help and plant knowledge! I will also be open to propagating plants to order when I have contributed enough to start selling.

I am a regular member of arachnoboards and NGA/garden .org so I am very familiar with forums and the frequency of members (myself) endlessly answering already answered questions on a daily basis, so rest assured I will be utilizing the searchhh function and searching through google!

I keep, fluctuating around ,100 different species of plants, bryophytes & lichens, and couple dozen arthopods which fluctuates with breeding projects. I haven’t kept hherps since around middle school before I got sick and had brain surgery but I have always wanted to get back into that world!

To introduce myself I will share a collection of builds I’ve done overtime! Thanks for reading and viewing!

My ≈46gal Living Room Display!

Planted 10/16/21

Have had it sealed, 10mo update from yesterday. Would love to potentially get some PDF’s in here. Plenty of isopods and Collembola spp. in there!

A planted Micro Tank for the Thelyphonida, Mastigoproctus tohono. Made 10 of these

A Christmas gift to my sister one year!

A planted tank for my female Psalmopoeus cambridgei tarantula

A very old multi-year old terrarium:

And a brand new living wall micro Epiphytic fern I’ve been working on since May, but that which got planted yesterday! I propagated all the plants especially for this build, to be able to get plants into the concave wood piece that had fairly small holes in it to plant things in. It’s been a really fun build creating mindfully 100% every aspect to be used specifically for this tank! It’s got a lot of growing in to do from the little cuttings but In a few months it will look gorgeous! I prefer to allow builds to start from small propagated plants and then grow in naturally vs. making look full day one!

That’s just a sample of some of my tank builds that I am fond of! Hope y’all enjoyed some of them. Thank y’all for taking the time to read and view this post I know it was a lot! Excited for this next chapter into adding some PDF’s to some tanks!

Gratefully,

Connor

 

[fishingguy12345]

Hello and welcome. You have Quite the collection of beautiful tanks.

 

[Smotzer]

Hello and welcome. You have Quite the collection of beautiful tanks.

Thanks for the welcome!! And thanks for the compliment on my tanks! I appreciate both!!

 

[tangled]

Welcome! I'm in TX also and enjoy the plant side of things too. And have keep arthropods (spiders and roaches mostly) as well as some other vertabrates.

 

[Smotzer]

Welcome! I'm in TX also and enjoy the plant side of things too. And have keep arthropods (spiders and roaches mostly) as well as some other vertabrates.

Thanks for the welcome! And thats awesome to hear! Nice to see there is some overlap between arthropods and vertebrates from keepers like yourself!

 

[IShouldGetSomeSleep]

Welcome, I also love vinegaroons I'm toying with the idea of keeping one again, probably one of Peter Clausen's CB ones as it would be neat to start with a young one instead of a WC adult, their are plenty of exoterra Nano tanks gathering dust in my closest...

What kind of substrate are you using and how is it at holding it's shape with all the tunneling?

 

[Smotzer]

Welcome, I also love vinegaroons I'm toying with the idea of keeping one again, probably one of Peter Clausen's CB ones as it would be neat to start with a young one instead of a WC adult, their are plenty of exoterra Nano tanks gathering dust in my closest...

What kind of substrate are you using and how is it at holding it's shape with all the tunneling?

All of mine are CB and the group is being raised up to maturity to get F2 CB! It’s a very long process! Young Mastigoproctus are harder to raise and I’ve had 3 death from the group for various unrelated reasons but they’re amazing when they are young.

substrate for them I mainly use a peat and more clay based topsoil. Peat alone dried to quick for them and the mix offers good moisture cycling, rewetting, and shape retention.

 

[bulbophyllum]

Have had it sealed, 10mo update from yesterday. Would love to potentially get some PDF’s in here. Plenty of isopods and Collembola spp. in there!

What do you mean by have had it sealed? There is no ventilation? Dart frogs are going to require ventilation.

 

[Smotzer]

What do you mean by have had it sealed? There is no ventilation? Dart frogs are going to require ventilation.

Yes it was sealed meaning no ventilation because it was not originally made for darts, it was an ecosystem project. If I were to decide to get darts for that the lid would be swapped back out for a ventilated lid. Definitely aware of that! Dont worry ha!

 

[IShouldGetSomeSleep]

All of mine are CB and the group is being raised up to maturity to get F2 CB! It’s a very long process! Young Mastigoproctus are harder to raise and I’ve had 3 death from the group for various unrelated reasons but they’re amazing when they are young.

substrate for them I mainly use a peat and more clay based topsoil. Peat alone dried to quick for them and the mix offers good moisture cycling, rewetting, and shape retention.

That's awesome! I have tried and failed to rear tailless whip spiders a couple of times... I bought 5 imports last year that had really cool eye spots hoping that I could breed them... all males, what are the odds! Still upset about that!

Unidentified possibly Phrynus whip spider with eyespots. This is a dead one. They have red stripes on the carapace when alive.

I even have Orin Mcmonigle's book on whip spiders and a couple others.... They provided useful sexing information. But I think im done with tail less whipspiders for awhile.

 

[JasonE]

Welcome to the forum!

No one's going to complain about answering your questions but we definitely appreciate you trying the search function first. Make sure you organize your searches by most recent. There's been a lot of info that's changed over the past 10 years.

There's a lot of conflicting info out there on many aspects of husbandry. Be wary of any source that talks about how many frogs you can stuff in a tank. Those are usually created by people trying to sell you as many frogs as possible. As well, the hobby is slowly evolving towards bigger and bigger enclosures so a lot of the info on tank size for PDFs is also outdated. So, always best to just create a new post if you can't find a clear answer.

 

[fishingguy12345]

As well, the hobby is slowly evolving towards bigger and bigger enclosures so a lot of the info on tank size for PDFs is also outdated

To echo this sentiment: i have not once regretted giving my frogs more space than they used to have. Every time I've upsized a tank I've always seen more interesting behaviours from the frogs than I had before. More space also allows me to use more pods / branches / etc. in the tank to give the frogs more things to use.

 

[Smotzer]

Welcome to the forum!

No one's going to complain about answering your questions but we definitely appreciate you trying the search function first. Make sure you organize your searches by most recent. There's been a lot of info that's changed over the past 10 years.

There's a lot of conflicting info out there on many aspects of husbandry. Be wary of any source that talks about how many frogs you can stuff in a tank. Those are usually created by people trying to sell you as many frogs as possible. As well, the hobby is slowly evolving towards bigger and bigger enclosures so a lot of the info on tank size for PDFs is also outdated. So, always best to just create a new post if you can't find a clear answer.

appreciate the welcome!!
And yeah from all the reading I have done I have seen quite a lot of differences between old and new threads with newer practices tending to keep less quantity in bigger and bigger enclosures. I personally appreciate some of that new mindset here, that in my eyes seems have pivoted away from the “collect em like skittles” mentality, that I see rampant in my other hobbies!

To echo this sentiment: i have not once regretted giving my frogs more space than they used to have. Every time I've upsized a tank I've always seen more interesting behaviours from the frogs than I had before. More space also allows me to use more pods / branches / etc. in the tank to give the frogs more things to use.

Very interesting to hear thanks Mori! Very interesting to think about that compared to arachnids and in particular theraphosidae, I know you get what I’m talking about.

While I’m responding, are there any major negatives to keeping a single individual of a species compared to a pair or small x.x group? It seems that at least pairs are the standard. Next to no threads really discuss this in any meaningful way. Just curious to learn information really.

 

[fishingguy12345]

While I’m responding, are there any major negatives to keeping a single individual of a species compared to a pair or small x.x group?

Not particularly, as far as we can tell.
Most people want groups of frogs so there aren't a ton of reports on here of solo frog keeping.

 

[Smotzer]

Thanks!

 

[JasonE]

Not particularly, as far as we can tell.
Most people want groups of frogs so there aren't a ton of reports on here of solo frog keeping.

I would just add that having more than one frog allows you to see behaviors that you're going to miss out on with a single frog.

 

[Sai]

Hello fellow Texans