Well after alot of discussion I'm going another step further with this. So my water feature would be pretty clean and all until the garters decide to poop in there. The size of snake poop compared to slow diffusion of ammonia from fish gills means that ammonia would obviously spike up in the enclosure. Will I'm sure it's normal in our enclosures and in the wild for our garters to sometimes sit in or drink some spoiled water I figured why not try and provide some serious filtration so that the ammonia levels are nice and low within ideally a few hours. The idea evolved from the original idea on a facebook group to incorporate an aquaponics system into the water feature. The other option with water features is frequent full water changes which is a pain. While doable on a large scale there seems to be two slight flaws with going the traditional route. First off traditional aquaponics is designed around a constant low level supply of waste from fish to feed the plants. As we know though alot of herps (sans turtles and very aquatic frogs) poop infrequently and vary from herp to herp on how much they poop in their water. Therefore you would have spikes of waste in the system then nothing at all for who knows how long which would not be good for plant growth..

So this led us down a new path of looking at plants used specifically to clean water. As of right now I'm planning out a system where I will have the water feature drain into a shallow sump below the tank with duckweed. The beauty of duckweed (and other plants like water cress and hyacinth) is they have the ability to soak up lots of waste in a very short period of time and use it over long periods. This is obviously ideal for a semi aquatic herp setup. Also just for good measure I'm also going to tie a system in for guppie breeding. I'm going to have two small tanks and two big tanks. Small tanks will be one for brood stock (probably 3 females and a male) and one for birthing/growing fry out. Other two tanks will be further growout and segregated by sex so as to control breeding. I should produce way more than enough with this so I might have to get a predatory fish setup at some point to take care of my excess lol.