Bioactive Dart Frog Enclosure Setup! / NanoVivarium Challenge

Transcript

hey what's up you guys my name is tyler ruggy welcome back to my youtube channel so i know i say this every single time but i am genuinely so excited to show you guys this video and just this enclosure in general i'm so proud of this this is probably like the best enclosure i actually like without a doubt i think this is the best enclosure i've ever made i'm also really proud of the paludarium i made for my uh pixie frog but i haven't posted that video yet and i probably won't for a while because i sought to edit that i want to give a huge thanks to josh's frogs and custom cages for sponsoring this video this is the nano bavarium challenge i'm doing this along with several other really talented creators custom cages provided us with a vision cage model 215 this is 28 by 14 by 20 inches and josh's frogs provided us with a bunch of supplies to kind of build a bioactive setup for this enclosure and because for my enclosure i decided to do a setup for dart frogs josh's frogs also provided me with my own poison dart frogs they provided me with the dendrobates tinctorius patricia and they're absolutely beautiful they've been in quarantine for the past couple months and i was able to build this really beautiful setup for them so huge shout out to josh's frogs for a lot of the supplies used in this i got a lot of my plants and substrate and a lot of my dart frog supplies from josh's frogs and i of course got the custom cages vision cage model 215 from custom cages i'll have both of their websites linked down below also you can use code tyler ruggy to get 15 off of josh's frogs.com so if you guys need to get any supplies for any reptiles or amphibians if you guys want plants including house plants or even if you guys want to buy any frogs or geckos or invertebrates

they have a huge selection so you can use code tyler ruggy to get 15 off your purchase this code is only valid to use one time per user so if you've already used my code before you unfortunately cannot use it again but if you have not used my discount code then go ahead and take advantage of that and without further ado let's go straight into showing you guys my setup process for this enclosure so the very first thing i did was i went in with spray foam this is just ponding stone spray foam subscribe and yeah this is just the foundation for the background hello once i had this back panel done i set some sticks in the background in the foam and i tied some twine around them and kind of propped them up i'm sure there's a smarter way of doing this but this is the first thing that came to my mind so i just stick the pieces of sticks in the foam the foam is going to harden around it and secure it in place things were falling over it was a mess again this wasn't the most efficient way to do this i'm sure but whatever and then after it dried a bit i went in and foamed the sides of the enclosure and everywhere else that i wanted there to be foam i also ran out of the black foam so i ended up having to go in and also use white foam so it looks really weird but just trust the process this is going to be really cool so once everything dried i gave it like a day to dry i went in with a little scraper and i started carving away this was very inefficient and i did eventually take a big knife that worked a lot better but i don't think i filmed myself actually using that but yeah i just scraped away until all of the smoothness was gone and it was just a rough surface left mostly and then i went and added more foam in

certain places where i thought i needed more i at one point tried to go in with a burner like a wood burner to make some different textures in the background and it didn't really work out very well at all this wasn't a very good tool to use for this and i ended up breaking it i ended up deciding to go in with a dremel instead which worked a lot better i would recommend the dremel so much more and i also had a shop vac to kind of try to suck up any debris that flies out and yeah i just use the dremel to kind of make different crevices and different textures in the background it's mostly focused on my arm so you can't really see what's going on but i was just making random textures in the background basically and then i mixed some black cement color with dry lock to create this paint that i'm going to use on the background and i just brush it on there i somehow managed to not film myself put the first coat down but this is what it ended up looking like after the first coat was down and then this time i mixed more but i did less of the black color so i made more of a lighter gray color and then i just took a dry paint brush and just very lightly kind of slowly brushed it over the top so this is going to get the light coloring kind of just in the areas that are higher and it's going to leave the crevices darker so this is going to just naturally create highlights in a lot of the places where they would naturally occur and this just really turns the background into a much more realistic looking rock and then we started going in with like white acrylic paint that i think we mixed with just a tiny bit of dry lock to make like a really light color and then we went in certain areas with that to create

really bright highlights and then i went in with some green and brown acrylic paints and i just dabbled them in different areas to create different colors because rock naturally isn't just grayscale there's going to be browns and greens and different things in there so this is just going to make it look a lot more natural this was the finished product of what the background ended up looking like and this maybe isn't like the most impressive thing ever but it's definitely the best background that i've ever created and i was extremely proud of how well it turned out so now we're gonna randomly cut to me creating a cute coco hut hide for my dart frogs using this terrarium moss from josh's frogs i just took some super glue dabbled it all over this cocoa hut and then stuck the moss down and hoped for the best and it actually ended up working out pretty well and looking

cute couldn't have done it without gizmo's help though of course now we get to the fun part which is actually putting together this enclosure so i start off by putting in a bunch of lekka [Music] and then i put down some like garden liner i don't know what that's called but it's to make it so the dirt doesn't fall down into the drainage layer and then for the substrate i used the josh's frog's abg mix i used about three bags of this and it's just a really nice combination of different things that creates a substrate that's going to be good for the plants and also have really nice drainage and hold in all the humidity that you need for things like the dart frogs so once i had all the substrate in and mixed together i just gave everything a good mist so that it would be nice and moist and ready for the plants to go in there so then i just went in and started adding the plants

so first we have the alocasia and then in the other side i ended up putting in a begonia i'm not an expert on what all these plants are but i try my best and a lot of these plants like i said are available on the josh's frog's website that's also where i got all the moss that i used [Music] and then once everything's planted and in there we get to go ahead and add the cleanup crew so these are my springtails once again from josh's frogs just pour some water in the container and then dump the excess out and a bunch of the springtails will come out with the water and then i'm also going to be adding some dwarf white isopods i have a ton of them in a colony that is just booming so i'm adding them into this enclosure [Music] do

[Music] so this is how the enclosure ended up turning out maddie did help me a bit with this enclosure so thank you maddie she helped me pin some moss on the background too which i think added a ton and yeah i'm just super happy with the final product and it's like my favorite enclosure ever so huge thanks to josh's frogs and custom cages for helping me out with all the stuff i needed for this enclosure it's just so cool [Music] so i hope you guys enjoyed this video once again huge thanks to custom cages for providing me with the vision cage huge shout out to josh's frogs for providing me with a lot of the other supplies i needed to put this enclosure together and also for providing me with these beautiful dart frogs they'll both be linked down in the description below so you guys can check them out and yeah thank you guys so much for watching if you guys are new here make sure to give this video a thumbs up if you guys liked it or you found it helpful make sure to hit the subscribe button if you guys haven't done so already don't know why you didn't do that yet but make sure to subscribe and check out all my social media links which will be down in the description below and i will see you guys in my next video [Music] foreign