Outdoor enclosure questions

[jwthought]

I'm flirting with the idea of building a large outdoor enclosure that I saw here:
http://www.chameleonnews.com/diy_outdoor.html

The problem is, where I live (in the Florida Keys) we have tons of ants. The design for this cage is floorless, so Im trying to think of ways to keep the ants out and any food insects in. Sure, I could incorporate a floor, but Im tryin to stick to the given design. Plus, I want it to be relatively easy to take apart, in case of a hurricane or something like that. I feel like adding a floor will make that more difficult to acheive. Any thoughts?

As for the cages potential inhabitants, ideally I want to use the cage to breed some of the less commonly CB chams. Given the climate of the Keys, (real hot, real humid) what do you all think might be a good candidate? I wanted a live bearing cham, but i dont think the majority of them would handle the climate too well. I was thinking a species from, say, Madagascar would do well.

Any comments/suggestions are appreciated. thanks!

 

[davemailcall]

There was a thread about ants a while back. One of the things that came up was that ants won't cross vegetable oil. The thread was about an enclosure that could be elevated up on legs, and so someone suggested putting the legs of table in coffee cans with a little oil in the bottoms.

Not sure if you can incorporate that into your design, but it definitely keeps the ants away.

I'm sure other people out there know other ideas.

 

[booshified]

my question is how would you feed your chams in there? i would think that you are not just going to buy a ton of crickets and let them loose. would you be cup feeding? maybe with a few different feeding stations?

 

[jwthought]

Thanks. Yeah, Ive read the same thing about the vegetable oil. Im just not sure how to incorporate it into this design. Any thoughts?

Yeah, I would provide feeding stations, but in my experience, some feeders always find a way out. I dont think it could be done safely, but I would love to release some feeders, and make the whole enclosure sort of self sufficient. I dont know how I would monitor the food intake, though. Plus I would worry about the feeders attacking the chams at night.

Any other ideas? What species would you recommend? Thanks.

 

[LaserGecko]

I used to have an ant proof dog food bowl. It had a 1/2" wide by 2" deep moat molded around it that held vegetable oil.

If you could implement that on a large scale, you'd be set. I could see using PVC pipe ripped down the middle, but I don't know how you'd keep it clean.

Alternatively, you could go back to the ranch and get a whole s--tload of darts (frogs).

 

[jwthought]

Y'know, intially this whole idea was about dart frogs! Ha!

 

[jwthought]

Any ideas on making the cage more or less self suffcient, especially as far as hunting prey is concerned? I dont know if that could work, but i think it would be real cool. It might prove too difficult to monitor food intake and such, though. I would worry about the prey overwhelming a cham as well.

Also, the cage in the link I originally posted is about 12 feet long. Do you think it would be possible to house multiple chams (same species) in such a large enclosure? I realize that this is frowned upon, and even dangerous in smaller enclosures, but could it work if chams were given adequate space? Of course there would be a huge amount of visual barriers and the like. Just curious.

Thanks again for all the knowledge!