Ok, now on to substrate. Substrate is the bedding for your reptile aquarium. For whatever reason reptile enthusiasts will like to call it substrate. Sounds a little more fancy. For a bearded dragon, what we're going to be looking at is your proper substrates here. There's a couple different ways you can go with it. You can go natural, or you can go unnatural. It doesn't really matter, either way as long as you're picking the correct substrates and you'll like how the aquarium looks. The first thing we're going to look at is a paper based product. Essentially it's recycled newspaper, mulched up, and reproduced. It's very soft, it's easy to burrow, easy to clean, however it's gray and it's not the most pretty looking thing in the world. But it is very safe for the dragon. This is what our main concern about is safety. Ok, now I'll get to more of that in just a second. The second kind of bedding you can look at would be a cocoa fiber. Generally you're going to find it in a brick mostly rather than a bag like this. What it is is shredded up coconut husks. It's totally inert and passes through the system just fine, and it's even partially digestible. Cocoa bedding, like I said will come usually in a brick that you are going to put in a gallon of warm water and it will expand out. The bricks are usually very expensive, three to four bucks and do quite enlarged aquariums. So it's also a very economical way to go. Lastly, there's the bark bedding. Now, when you're looking at a bark bedding, you want to make sure it's something like a Douglas fir bark, you want to stay away from pines, you want to stay away from birch, you want to stay away from cedar. It's very important, those all have bad oils and they can hurt your reptile. It's also very important that the wood chip is big. It has to be a big wood chip so that it cannot be ingested because that will not be safe for your reptile, and we'll talk about safety in just a second.
tierra01
Mar 23, 2009
are you supposed to let the coconut fibers dry out in the sun after you soak them for the bearded dragon? tierra