I have been working on a 125 gallon vivarium for garters

[Jeff B]

Been working all fall on building a 125 gallon bioactive vivarium for my garters.
I made the fake rock background out of styrofoam, spray expanding foam and concrete.
I has lots of shelves with holes for climbing and two underground caves, one on the hot side and one that looks thru the glass into the pool area.
It has a false bottom made from egg crate and two 1 inch pvc vent stacks that go up to the surface to release gas.
There is 6ft of heat tape underneath running the length of the tank that heats the caves and the substrate as well as the water in the pool.
The water runs about 72-73 degrees and the air is 68 at night and 74 during the day with 90 degree hot spots in the caves.
The pool side top is all glass lid and the other side is screen top, which creates a temp and humidity gradient.
The pool side has a waterfall in the back which is the output for the build it filter that I made in the corner with sponge layer then two layers of floss sheeting before the pump.
I am running a Current Pro LED with remote control programming with lighting and cloud effects. Plus a 12"x12" LED grow light panel with red and blue plus UV over the pond end. With mini heat/uv on the other end.
It is heavily planted both on the land and in the water. Eventually the vining plants will fill in.
There is also a large piece of driftwood on the basking side to climb on.
The pool houses my 5 pigmy black and blue sunfish and a couple snails and lots of cherry shrimp. I plan to add some white clouds which may or may not become food. As heavily planted as it is it will be a challenge for garters to catch them, but it's ok if they do.
This spring after the plants are well established I plan to put a pair of garters in it.
For some reason I am unable to add photos, not sure why

[Jeff B]

vivarium.jpgvivarium pool.jpg

[MNGuy]

Wow! This is amazing and beautiful! Excellent job! I would love to do something like this one day. My two garters are still babies, so I’m keeping them on newspaper until they get bigger and become more tame before I move them into a bioactive setup.

Do you you have any videos/YouTube of the build?

[Eddie]

It really came out awesome bud!!

[BUSHSNAKE]

Im hoping to do a display cage for my garters when theyre adults

[Zdravko092368]

That's absolutely amazing, I have simplistic bioactive vivs for all my garters, nothing crazy like that. Awesome job!

[Albert Clark]

Amazing craftsmanship! Grats...

[Jeff B]

Wow! This is amazing and beautiful! Excellent job! I would love to do something like this one day. My two garters are still babies, so I’m keeping them on newspaper until they get bigger and become more tame before I move them into a bioactive setup.

Do you you have any videos/YouTube of the build?

I did take some pictures along the way during the build. I will try to round them all up and post them.

[Jeff B]

I posted about 50 pictures of the 125 gallon vivarium build as it progressed as well as some videos on the garter snake morph facebook page here:Garter-Snake-Morph-197091403646035