Tubs/Enclosures
This page contains some of the things that I have learned regarding how to build or secure enclosures for your snakes. It will be updated as time permits.
We choose to use standalone tubs instead of rack systems in our animal room, partially because when we first started we liked the idea of being able to move a snake to a new location without having to actually pic him/her up. The tubs we choose are usually tubs that are latch-able on the sides. Recently we have moved to mainly Sterilite tubs from Target (the purple handled ones). They are 32 quart and fit very nicely on our wire racks are are perfect for most medium sized colubrids (kings, small milks, small rats, etc)
The primary problem with these type of tubs is that the plastic they use to make the tops is not quite as thick as other tubs on the market. This leads to the tops being quite bendable. This can lead to escapes as the snakes are able to push the top up enough to escape. We learned this the hard way with one of our splotched Sinaloan milksnakes (also happened to be our favorite snake too!).
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After we lost the Sinaloan milksnake and a few other snakes escaped (but we found them), we knew we had to do something to modify the tubs to make them more escape proof. When wandering around IKEA one day, we found that they had clips for their style of tubs that looked like they would fit the Target Sterilite tubs nicely. We went with the smaller of the two clip styles IKEA has available. They are $0.50 for a pack of 4!
However, they did not fit perfectly onto the Target Sterilite boxes as we had hoped. So in order to make the clips a bit more secure we took a sodiering iron and melted grooves into the plastic top as seen in the picture below to the left. It is hard to get a good picture of the melted groove but it is ~1/8" deep and usually does not penetrate the entire way through the plastic top. Make sure to do this outdoors because you don't want to breathe in the fumes of melting plastic! What that produced was a point where the plastic clip can "grip" the slippery plastic top as seen in the picture below to the right. |
After performing the same groove melting to all four corners of the Sterilite tub, we added the clips to them (picture below to the left). We choose to use 4 clips instead of just 2 in the middle because we wanted to ensure that the snakes could not push up at the corners of the top and escape that way. The end result of this is a tub that no longer allows the top to flex nearly as much as it did prior to adding the clips.
We hope you find this page helpful, please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about how to do this yourself! Thanks!