Substrates for Reptile Terrariums

"Now I'm going to put the substrate in first of all and what I use is sand. The bearded dragon is a desert type animal so you want to make sure that you use and or something similar. You can use play sand that you can purchase from a hardware stores. You just need to make sure that it's a silica based sand instead of something that's more coarse because if it's ever ingested it can cause problems. I like to use this, it's called a calcium substrate, it's made by repto-lite and it's perfect for what I am looking for because this is something that is not necessarily coarse. The each grain is supposed to be round so it doesn't have, it's not very coarse so it doesn't cause any problems for your animals. And even if it is ingested it's completely digestible. It's made out of calcium, it's even a good source of extra calcium for your reptiles. So I would recommend some sort of calcium substrate. I have a two different bags of sand. I have a twenty pound bag and a ten pound bag. It's available in both. I'm going to start with the twenty pound bag because it may be enough to cover the bottom here. I got the ten pound just in case I needed a little bit more. I'm just going to dump this right in here. You want to get a layer that's probably about two inches deep maybe three inches. I know it will at least take this whole bag so I'm just going to dump it on in. And you can just spread it out and see how deep that gets us. And that looks like it's going to be perfect. So I'm not going to be using the ten pound bag after all. I'll use that for backup at a later time, next time I need to clean the tank. Now you can see how deep the substrate is here. Bearded dragons sometimes do like to dig a little bit in the sand and that's why you want to make sure you provide a nice, nice thick layer of the sand in the bottom of the tank here. Be careful to avoid too much heavy articles in your glass aquariums, the sand I have is the heaviest object I put in the aquariums, since it's so heavy I avoid putting anything else since it weighs very much."