Where do you buy your hides?

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odalisque

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I can never find any that look good to me. Everything at my local pet store is hideous or has too many jagged edges.
I want something that looks beautiful, tried looking for custom ceramics but the only ones I liked were too small.
Will probably end up just buying a pot with a nice glaze on it.

One day maybe take a ceramics class and make something on my own :D
 
I got mine at a local pet store - but they have a really huge selection.

I have the "medium" shown here : Amazon.com: Marina Naturals Malaysian Driftwood with Plants, Small: Pet Supplies

And they have this bigger one, too : Amazon.com: Marina Naturals Malaysian 1/2 Log Driftwood with Plants - Large: Pet Supplies

I also bought some rocks there and made a second hide with them (( Picture )). The plants also serve as "hides" - the bit to the left of her fake log actually provides a little "tunnel" in itself that she hangs out in a lot.

She didn't like plastic plants much, so if you want non-live, I would suggest silk/fabric soft plants. You could make an arch with them and produce a hide that way. :) The plants also extend the "safety zone" of her log.

I've seen people use natural driftwood/bogwood, too - some shapes work on their own, others can combine with pants and such.
 
Hides from pet stores are a rip-off. I make my own or buy gardening pots for less than a dollar at my local department store. Who would pay $20 for a hollow piece of plastic? Not me.

However, my grandmother loves to decorate my axie tank, and buys all sorts of expensive hides from Petsmart and gives them to me - she buys them at the same time that she's shopping for new clothes for her chihuahua.
 
I have two hides in my axie tank, the first is about 15 cm long and is shaped like a straight log it cost $2.50 at a two dollar shop in the pet section.

the other came from a chain store and is also a log but has two side holes in it as well as the ones at each end and it cost 16 dollars. It is much bigger at about 35cm and Axle likes this one the most because now that he is close to full grown he can completely hide in it where as the smaller one his tail sticks out.

so check out the pet section in your cheap two dollar shop, near the fish products. I tried pots but he kept on moving them around too much in the glass bottom tank. Which I am going to change over to sand in a few weeks time as the weather cools down.

I have also bought some silk fake plants of ebay that i plan to put in the tank when it has sand.
 
nice stuff ^_^
i would love to DIY those pipes if i had proper tools.
 
I'm planning on making some hides out of polymer clay. Once its cooked its safe for the aquarium. Just a thought :D
 
Ooh true!
I actually have some clay laying around hah. Guess I now have a weekend project!
 
I just got a little clay pot for less than a dollar and Rosie seems to really like it. She also has a cheapish plastic plant that she likes to chill in/on top of. :D
 
I have pieces of PVC pipe, in 2 and 3 inch diameters. Bury them in the same a lil so they can get traction while walking through them. My axi's love them
 
Is it polymer? I know for sure that only certain types of polymer are safe (aka not the ones with the weird sparkles and stuff) etc.
I'm not sure about any other kinds of clay.
 
just bought mine at the aquarium store, which also provided the slate slabs, the plants and all other nescessary stuff :happy:

priced at about €40 per piece.. i got 2.
which brings the total tank cost to about €500
i guess i could have done it cheaper, but my tank looks pretty snazzy now.
no mesh lid, no cheap fan blowing on the water, no flower pots..
so i dont really mind paying those amounts.. its my hobby.. and hobby's cost money. :D

i checked johnny's sculps.. they look awesome!!
but frankly i dont have the time ( nor the patience, or the artistic talent ) to create things like that!
plus i dont like flower pots ( and the guy at the convienent store will tell you it is safe for aquariums anyway.. what does he know about plastics and paint? all he wants is to sell the pot :rolleyes: )
so, i buy them at the aquarium shop in a beautifully designed box saying it is OK to be put in an aquarium :happy:
 
So I just went on a couple of hikes and found a few great rocks! Three of them are very blocky and I will be able to stack them to make a nice little hut, I think I want to get some sort of cement to glue them together first. Washing them several times before I put them in of course.

I was wondering, one of my rocks is blue/green in color. I found it in a river that is mostly mountain spring water, but I've read that green rocks contain too much copper? Should I avoid putting this rock in the tank?
 
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I don't tend to like ANY of the stuff that they sell at stores or anything like that either. I'm a vain person and focus a lot on details so I always want everything to look nice. Although, I've noticed that a lot of the time, when you see something sitting on the shelf, it would look completely different in the tank.

Most of the time, we cover our rocks and logs and what not with plants. My axolotl tank has a log with Java Fern attached to it. They like to sit on top of the leaves and will hide under the crevasses of the log. There's also a fake hollow log and it has some sort of anubius tied to it. In the corners of the tank, there are two PVC pipes and I covered those with rocks. They also like to hide under the sponge filters and will find caves between the rocks too. There was also this cool ceramic head we found at Petco once that had Java Moss on it, but we took off the moss and the head just lays on it's side. They like to go in that too.

Anyway, my point is that if you find something you like, but it's ugly, even in the tank, just cover it up with substrate or plants. One time we made a cave with a cut up piece of tupperware and just covered it with substrate. The fish would fight over that little cave. Oh, and one time we had a flat piece of plastic stuck in the substrate and there was substrate on top of it too. It made a little ditch that fish would go into also. Just be creative.

Also, should mention that I don't believe polymer clay is aquarium safe. I've been told you shouldn't even eat off of the plates you've cooked it on. And when buying or making ceramics, you need to make sure you're working with stuff that is aquarium safe also. Glazes and paints can pollute the water.
 
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