BIOACTIVE VIVARIA PART 2
Part one here
Alright. Let's get into the most exciting part. Decor and resident cleaners!
Decor
I've made a couple posts on safe vs. unsafe decor but as a quick recap;
Yes! -
Plastic plant pots, fake or real plants, leaf litter, sticks and twigs, moss
No! -
Stone, ceramic or terracotta pots, crystals, rocks, ceramic, glass or stone dishes/decor (many fishtank decorations are made of stone and ceramic), basically anything hard or pointy.
Decorating a vivarium is great fun. Snails seem to enjoy, as much as a snail can enjoy, climbing and exploring sticks, bark and plastic hides. It also creates visual appeal. I have some pictures of a friend's snail tanks here
basically just have fun with this, and just assess with each decoration if a snail would hurt themselves falling onto it. Nothing pointy, nothing hard.
Clean up crew (CUC), also known as janitorial or custodial creatures.
The most helpful, angelic little creatures. These guys will eat and break down snail poop, old food, mould and other mess in your tank. They negate the need to clean out poop and whatnot. Your most common cuc will be springtails (tiny tiny little creatures that jump around and eat mould and decaying waste) and isopods (small crustaceans with lots of legs, commonly known as rolly pollys, pillbugs or woodlice, they eat all kinds of decaying material and mould). You will probably also end up with detritivorous mites (little reddish brown near spherical mites) and little hairlike worms. They just seem to find their way into BioVs.
Springtails
Springtails are very small, jumping creatures (1-3mm long usually), usually white, grey or brown.
Where do I get springtails?
There are a few ways to acquire springs. You can purchase them from a shop or someone selling a culture of them (you'll commonly find these on places like gumtree, craigslist or Facebook marketplace) or you can collect them from the wild. If you or someone you know has a worm farm or compost pile, there are probably springtails in it. Place a dish on top of the soil or compost, place a banana peel or a couple mushrooms onto it, and leave it for about a day.
Hold your bait above a bowl of water and blow gently onto it. Springtails will probably jump off. Place the bait into the water and swish it around a little. Springtails are very tiny and will float atop the water. You can collect them with a spoon or something similar and dump them into the tank. Look closely before you put them into the tank to make sure you're not bringing other critters with them. Springs look like this;
and will usually jump away if you blow on them.
You can use the same bait and water thing by placing the bait somewhere damp and dark outside with decaying leaves and waiting a couple hours for them to gather. If you don't want the risk of hitch-hikers or other uninvited critters, they're not very expensive to buy. You only need like 30 to start a nice colony in a small tank, but get as many as you can.
How do you keep springtails healthy and happy?
Ignore them, basically. They need damo surroundings to breathe but otherwise they'll just happily wander the tank eating little moulds and snail poops and such. They're often in/under the soil so you may not see them often. Very unobtrusive.
Isopods
aka rolly pollys, aka pillbugs, aka woodlice, aka
friends
isopods are very cute and very helpful. They're actually a crustacean.
Where do I acquire isopods?
Like with springtails, you can buy them or forage them. Many isopod breeders have very fun species of pod that have cool colours and funky patterns, there's some that look like little rubber duckies, and they're very cute. Ideally get 15+ to start. Again, gumtree, fb marketplace or Craigslist are good places, or online bug stores.
Foraging them is a bit easier than springtails because they're large enough to handle. Anywhere there's decaying leaves and wood, there is also probably pods. Shuffle around dead leaves, and just gently pick them up either with your fingers or with a plastic spoon or something similar. Be gentle! Don't take hundreds of them, unless they're invasive, to avoid messing with the ecosystem around them. They are important.
How do I keep isopods healthy and happy?
Fairly simple. A standard snail tank is pretty ideal for these guys. They need moisture to breathe, and they like eating dead leaves. An important note is that they need protein and calcium, or they will begin to eat each other. They very much like fish food flakes, and dead bugs. Just put a little extra protein in the tank when you give your snails their protein. You should have a cuttlebone available at all times anyway, so they will use that for calcium. I've also found they enjoy some crushed eggshell sprinkled around. They will often indulge in sweet potato, mushroom and other veggies you feed your snails. These guys love to dig, so until the population is quite large you may not see them often. They like to hitch rides atop snails shells because they can't climb smooth glass on their own lol.
Introduction to the tank
To be honest with you, just dump your cuc in there. They'll wander off and sort themselves out. If you haven't yet got your snails, wait like a month or so for them to grow their population, feeding them things like mushroom (a springtail favourite) and fish flakes. If you already have the snails you can skip that but you may need to give the cuc a hand to keep things clean (scooping out poops and such) until they have their population high enough to keep the tank clean themselves. Once they're established, they're pretty self sustaining.
Side note;
If you have very small or baby snails, that are smaller than isopods, just add springtails and skip the pods. They're not particularly violent and likely wouldn't actively kill a snail but I wouldn't risk it.
Okay! There we are. The microbiota (bacteria and fungi) will sort of colonise themselves in the tank, you can grab a spoonful of a friend's viv substrate to "seed" it but its not really necessary. I hope this is helpful to everyone. Please let me know if you have questions and I'll do my best to get you an answer. Thank you for reading!!
