Interesting Idea!!!

[Armand]

hey, we have a pool around 20m long and 8m wide (big pool) but I am SICK of cleaning it!! so i had the idea of taking the water out and putting repitles in it.. I read the Steve Irwin book and that is what he did to rescued animals.. If i can what reptiles could i house together (looking at monitors, skinks, dragons, non-ven snakes)..

cheers and let me know if you think its a stupid or good idea or just silly..

 

[Magpie]

How will you keep the rainwater out of it?

 

[Riley]

i was thinking of something similar to that a month ago,except with turtles..and except i dont even have a pool

i never thought of non-aquatic reptiles..good idea, i reckon!

replying to Magpies question; you could put a shelter above? like a tempory roof or something?


also, watch out when putting arboreal lizards in there - put like plastic (what they use at the reptile park) on the walls. put a fence with a lock (or something for security) around the pool

 

[Tirilia]

Very neat idea! Just build a roof over it that slants the water away, add a few drainage holes etc. Just try to think of everything that could go wrong, and then think of solutions.

Would be awesome to see it finished.. the idea puts me in the mind of the sunken jungle Raptor enclosure in Jurassic Park

 

[waruikazi]

I would imagine in Sydney you would be rather limited in the number of species you could keep alive in an outdoor pit during winter.

But if i was to do it would probably go mainly turtles, file snakes, mcleays water snakes etc and Mertins water monitors (obviously keeping some water in it.)

 

[Magpie]

You could roof it, but then how would you heat it? It would no longer get any sunlight.

 

[Aslan]

You could roof it, but then how would you heat it? It would no longer get any sunlight.

Exactly...sounds like a difficult pit to make work...

 

[bredli84]

the pool in our old place had a drain at the bottom, if u opened a valve on the pump you could empty it.
this was probably because it was at the top of a hill, so could easily drain away.

if i was you, i would set it up for lacies, or a combination of water dragons, turtles etc. maybe leave water in the eep end.

 

[Armand]

yeah i already thought of putting mesh as a froom with like 15 heat mats and also like 10 heat lamps.. first got to talk to dad about it though :-(.. but its good to know you guys reckon its a good idea..

 

[wood_nymph]

why don;t you turn it into a huge pond? you could fill it with native fish, turtles and if it had an escape proof fence around it you could have water dragons on the land. that's what i'm going to go if i ever buy a home with a pool.

 

[falconboy]

You could build soil up in the middle and have a gentle slope from it. At the bottom of the slope have a channel and you can use what they use in boats - 12v bilge pumps with a float switch (water gets to a certain level, the float moves and runs the pump, when its pumped out, it stops). Just an idea.

 

[Just_Joshin]

Have a read of the latest reptiles australia. There is an article on a huge pit built that had a mound in the middle and formed a moat around the outside during the wet season.

However, i mush prefer the idea of an aquatic reptile setup, with maybe just an island in the middle about 5 metres long and 3 metres wide. You could house, Turtles, Water Dragons, file snakes, macleays, water pythons........best of all is you could snorkel around in it and check out the file snakes, turtles and even water dragons in their underwater environment,

 

[Glider]

I used to have a converted swimming pool reptile pit when I was a kid and it was awesome.
It does depend on what kind of pool you have to start with though- is yours in-ground, half/half or above ground? A concrete or fibreglass in-ground pool is probably not going to be a good pool to start with.

I had a half inground/ half aboveground pool that was just lined with plastic so we ripped that out and had a dirt base. We made a mound of topsoil in the centre on top of some rows of Besser bricks covered in tarp and also a few lengths of pvc pipe to make some dry tunnels in it. Used one of those kiddies plastic half clams shells sunk into the floor as a pond for water that also housed a turtle. Planted it out and put all the raked up leaves from the garden in a pile for the bluetongues to hide in, and topped the mound with large rocks and hollow logs to make crevasses and solid basking sites (make sure the rocks are really secure though).

About once every wet season, after about a week of monsoon rain I would have major dramas with flooding in the pit due to the ground becoming waterlogged and unable to drain away any more water. I'd have to evacuate everyone into pillowcases in the spare room for a few days untill the water went down (except the turtle, who thought it was fabulous). I'd be out there in the middle of the night with mum holding a neatly folded pile of her pillowcases, a torch and an umbrella, and me thigh-deep in muddy water in the rain grabbing bluey's all piled up on the very top of the mound or clinging to a floating log or the spindly tops of bushes.
Sounds a bit disturbing but I never ever lost any animals due to flooding in the pit as there was always high ground to go to. The mound in the pit was tall enough to be a little higher that ground-level outside the pit, which I think helped a lot.

I was living in Darwin at the time so heating wasn't an issue at all. I kept a heap of bluey's, a couple of monitors, a hosmers skink and a long-necked turtle in together, and the only problems I had with them together were the blueys fighting in breeding season. I think the trick with your animals is to keep to species that occur in areas with the same climate as yours so they'll be ok outside.