So, you’ve made the leap. You’ve gotten “serious” about herpetoculture. You’re going to make yourself a herp room. A dedicated space for you to indulge your scaly pastime. Yet, moving animals and enclosures into a space and plugging everything in does not a herp room make. Many of us would love to have a room with a comfortable recliner where we just enjoy our reptiles quietly. That is not the reality of a herp room. A herp room is a place where urates are cleaned up. It’s often hotter and more humid than the rest of your home. And, depending on your collection, it can be full of things that want to bite you and then musk in it.
My herp room is actually a facility with a main floor and a full basement. It has a nice couch. I don’t know when I last sat in it. Herp rooms are functional spaces. Our collections don’t sit on shelves and collect dust. They lead intricate and varied lives, for which we are entirely responsible. Herp rooms can be beautifully curated spaces but they are spaces where work is done nonetheless. So, let’s get started on what one guy in Illinois, with a bunch of reptiles, thinks you need in your herp room. As advised by his wife.
1. Cleaning Supplies
This one seems obvious but even if your herp room is just a spare bedroom in your home, you should still have dedicated cleaning supplies. If you can dedicate a sink to your space then you’re ten steps ahead of the rest. The key to any sink is depth. Having a shop sink or commercial style sink is invaluable when cleaning oddly shaped pieces of décor, filling buckets or scrubbing a small mountain of tubs.
Most folks won’t have the option of a dedicated sink as herp rooms are typically a spare bedroom at home and can be as small as a spare closet. No matter where the sink is situated, HOT water is key to cleaning and sanitizing items in your room. Bleach can be used when trying to sanitize items used between animals while something as simple as Dawn dish soap works for general cleaning. Any and all cleaning takes a bit of elbow work and a good scrub pad will help that along.
Moving that water means a herp room bucket or two. I have several large enclosures and turtle tubs so I have a small stack of 5 gal buckets as well as a hose connection for my sink. A smaller room could get by with one of those cleaning buckets that comes in a kit with a mop. They also make good storage for scrub pads and rags. Buy paper towels in bulk and stack them right alongside.
Depending on your collection inhabitants, I would also include a spray bottle or bottles in this section. Be sure to mark spray bottles if they’re used for cleaning as opposed to just water for your animals! Teresa and I have been using a Rescue Spray (Buy some here) product that is a hydrogen peroxide mixture for cleaning and sanitizing. We’ve had success including it in our cleaning and sanitizing routine.
For my fellow Monitor keepers out there with deep substrate composed of mulch and dirt, consider a Shop-Vac!
2. Meters
These types of equipment are a bit more specialized and can add some expense to your herp room outlay but can be vital dependent on your choice of animals. Measuring and regulating temperature, humidity, UV, light cycle, etc. is paramount to the health of many species and can be of special importance to those folks trying to breed their animals. Any single parameter or all of those parameters, and how they change throughout the year, could be the key to your animals cycling properly.
Heat is the most obvious one that we’re all concerned with in keeping animals that can’t produce their own. I still use the old school temp gun from Pro Exotics to check my temps and have a variety of brands for my thermostats. These products will be highly dependent on your captives and your style of keeping. Are you running tubs and heat tape? Enclosures with radiant heat panels? Heat lamps? Ceramic heat emitters? The temp gun is a vital tool in ensuring that your temps are correct, no matter the system you choose.
Humidity is usually next on the list for most keepers. Hygrometers are fairly simple tools that can be purchased from many manufacturers. Modern herpetoculture is very fortunate in that many thermostats will measure humidity along with temperature or they have add-ons that make this possible. Again, this is dependent on your chosen species but given how varied relative humidity is in all of our homes it is a necessity that we measure it in our room and the enclosures therein.
A hot button topic as of late is UV and its use. The arguments for and against are meant for another article but should you choose to use this type of lighting in your herp room then you certainly need a way to measure the output of your bulbs. UV is one of those parameters where we absolutely can give too much or too little, depending on species. Your bulb placement, timing and use will determine many factors in your enclosure creation and how your species utilize that enclosure. For that reason, it is absolutely required that you measure UV with a meter of some kind should you choose to use the lights.
3. Hooks & Tongs
Finally, the cool equipment we all wanted to buy in the first place! The industry side of herpetoculture has several companies coming out with awesome new tools at each reptile show I go to. These pieces of equipment are cool and fun but are also very functional and can be a necessity dependent on the species comprising your collection.
Venomous folks are their own niche in the hobby and have a serious need for the multitude of tools available to them. Hooks, tongs, forceps and the like are useful in our everyday lives when dealing with animals but are safety necessities for those folks working with venomous collections.
As with all herp room must-haves, your tool collection will be dependent on your animal collection. I think everyone needs a pair of tongs for feeding and at least one hook for moving snakes that don’t want to move. The size, type and style of these will depend entirely on your use of them and on the animals themselves. I have everything from a hatchling hook to a home defender hook which could probably double as a hockey stick. I also move snakes from Boiga size to Burmese python size. Hooks are also very versatile tools and not just snake movers. Today, my wife used a 36” hook to lift a Mangrove Monitor out from behind an enclosure and into my hands.
I absolutely love feeding with tongs and recommend it to all keepers so they’re listed here as a must-have. 24” tongs are great for those Monitors and Tegus that like to jump for their food. 6-10” tongs work just fine for holding that pinkie out and wiggling to get the attention of a hatchling colubrid.
4. First Aid
My wife and I discussed these last two sections and first aid came up immediately. We use our animals in educational demonstrations and so thought of first aid for ourselves first. If you keep Monitors or animals with large claws then cuts and scrapes are going to naturally happen. Peroxide, cleaning wipes, and a few sizes of band-aid are usually all you’ll need.
Hand sanitizer or antibacterial soap is another must have. You’re going to get dirty when cleaning and you don’t want to carry that with you outside of the room. Our kids help us clean and sanitize and they have sensitive skin so when using bleach or peroxide they wear cleaning gloves. Simple rubber gloves that you can get from the hardware or grocery store.
First aid for your animals is a slightly different story. All reptile keepers should have a way to control mites. Frontline is a great product that you can have on hand. Nix is a lice treatment that works for mites and can be stored easily in the home herp room. There are also several brands of commercial mite spray. Actual medications from your veterinarian will occasionally require refrigeration so that is something to consider. Triple antibiotic ointment is another versatile tool for those small injuries that animals sometimes sustain.
5. The Herp Room Cart
If you’ve listened to herp podcasts for any length of time then you’ve probably heard folks talk about how awesome it is to have a little cart in their herp rooms. It seems like such a simple thing but the ease of putting all those supplies we just listed on a cart and then going about your work cannot be understated. It’s also a great way to store those supplies.
A variant of this idea came from my wife and that is a stool or chair, especially a chair that rolls. This is, of course, dependent on the size of your room and the layout of your enclosures. My wife is quite a bit shorter than me so working on a handful of arboreal setups requires a stool and makes things significantly easier for her. Conversely, I can sit in a rolling chair and work in our hatchling rack quite easily as opposed to staying bent over for however long it takes me to change waters or feed babies.
I’ve also become a proponent of having a place to sit in your herp room in an effort to convince some keepers to spend more time there. Keeping reptiles and watching them live their lives was the fascination that got most of us into this hobby. If we’ve advanced now to the point of having an entire room of these animals then we should make it easier for ourselves to spend time with them. This also includes the people in your life that you want to share your herps with. Having a place for that friend or relative to sit while you bore them to death with frog facts and show them every new monster you bought will make them much more likely to smile and nod long enough for dinner to be done.
So, pack your cleaning supplies away on your cart and park it in the corner. Wash your hands and take a seat on your rolling chair. Your hooks and tongs are put away and your parameters are set according to your meters. Now, enjoy your herp room and the awesome collection within!
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