Snake tank, false bottom with clay balls, about ten centimetres of substrate, springtails and isopods added at setup. I mist twice a day, there is no fan and the vents are two small strips at the front. The smell is sour and swampy rather than rotten, and I cannot find anything obviously dead. Do I dig it out or is this fixable from the top?
Two mists a day into a tank with two small vents and no airflow is the whole problem. Cut misting to whatever keeps the animal right and no more, get some air moving even if it is a tiny computer fan, and add a proper deep layer of leaf litter so the top stays open rather than sealing. Then add more springtails, because in a sour tank they usually crashed weeks ago and nothing is processing the waste.
Fix the moisture before you add more springtails, or you are just feeding a bog and wondering why the population does not hold.
Two small vents and two mistings a day does sound ridiculous now that somebody has said it back to me.
Check the water level in your drainage layer before anything else. Mine had risen above the mesh and was sitting in the substrate, and I siphoned nearly two litres out of a tank the same size as yours through a bit of tubing pushed down the back corner. The smell was gone in three days without touching the plants.
Slightly different read: with one large animal producing large waste, the cleanup crew is probably undersized rather than dead. A snake tank needs a much heavier isopod population than a gecko tank of the same size, and if you seeded once at setup you have not kept up with the load.
For scale, in a 36 inch tank with a snake I mist properly once every two or three days and let it dry between. Twice a day is closer to a dart frog schedule and those tanks have much heavier ventilation and drainage to cope with it. The animal drinks from a bowl, the tank does not need a rainstorm.
Worth checking behind the background and under the cork for escaped feeder insects too. I once spent a week diagnosing a smell that turned out to be a dozen dead crickets in a gap I could not see.
@leaf_litter_lou · 4mo ago · 3 replies
Sour and swampy is anaerobic substrate, sweet and rotten is something dead. What you are describing is the substrate going airless because it is compacted and permanently wet, not a corpse. Lift the hide and the water bowl first to rule out the easy thing, then fix the water balance rather than digging the tank out.
Reply
Report
@gio_castellan · 4mo ago
That sponge feel is the diagnosis. Healthy substrate should crumble and smell like a forest floor, not squeeze.
Reply
Report
@aquariumdad · 4mo ago
Nothing under the hide. So compacted and wet it is, which matches the fact that the substrate feels like a sponge when I press it.
Reply
Report