Re-design of the azureus tank

The vivarium that has housed our Tinctorius Azureus has been bugging me for a while now. As I didn't use coco fibre matting on the sides of this the plants have been growing well... too well. The ficus has been growing out of control and because of the humid environment algae has been growing on the plants and on the glass... yuk.
I decided enough was enough and to have it all out and give it a quick reshuffle and replant using some of the new plants I bought at the Kidderminster show.
Here's what I started with:

Retail Guzmania bromeliads have done their job but quiet frankly I dont like them and would prefer not to use them any more. The creeping fig has got out of control and I cant keep up with hacking it back, plus I knew there was a big ugly spider living amongst it. If you are wondering, the fruit fly culture is sitting there to let the last few fruit flies out so I can ditch the culture and start again.

     So I stripped the worst out and here's the result of the unforgiving hacking followed by gluing cocofiber matting to each side wall:

And on the plus side I got the little (well pretty big really) spider, it was yet another Steatoda nobilis http://www.uksafari.com/falsewidows.htm.

so a little jiggery pokery with some of the wood i removed from the floor:

Oh and I added the waterfall back to the left corner. I then took the larger piece of wood that had several Guzmania pups growing on it and removed the plants, replaced them with a couple of the new plants and placed it in the tank:

I thought the nice burst of red in the centre would draw the eye to the vivarium as a bit of a focal point.











I added small offcuts of creeping fig to the bottom edges hoping that they will grow up and cover the walls. Hopefully I will be able to keep on top of it this time. a couple more bromeliads later and here we go:

The frogs are back in and looking around and I cant wait to see what it looks like after a couple of months growing in.