Sterilizing and using materials from outside

[thatdudegaming]

I am setting up a fire salamander vivarium, and i found some good bark pieces outside. I know you are supposed to sterilize them, which i did by washing them with hot water and then baking them at 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. Is this enough to sterilize the bark pieces? There was some nice moss on it but im sure it got baked lol

 

[Mark]

We have an article on wood treatment here: Caudata Culture Articles - Wood in Vivaria

Personally, I stopped sterilising wood for terrestrial caudate enclosures years ago and haven't noticed any ill effects. Sterelised wood will nearly always become fungus ridden when it gets damp as the micro flora/fauna has been destroyed. Obviously there are risks of introducing parasites, unwanted invetebrates or possibly amphibian disease but I think they are pretty low. Fire salamanders live in forests surrounded by wood and usually choose to hole up in rotting wood. Infact, the reason they are called fire salamanders is because they would crawl out of the wood on bonfires and people thought they were born of the fire. In other words, fire salamanders like wood and none of it is baked or boiled

 

[peter5930]

I get mushrooms growing in my tanks from the unsterilised wood I put in them. It doesn't seem to bother the animals (no poisonous mushrooms so far, and the species of fungus that produce mushrooms digest cellulose and lignin, rather than keratin like the pathogenic fungal species), and it makes the tanks more attractive.

Something to be careful about is introducing centipedes, ground beetles, earwigs and rove beetles to a tank with small juveniles in it, since they could munch their way through the juveniles. I saw a rove beetle (Ocypus olens) eat a ground beetle (Broscus cephalotes); the rove beetle was able to crack open the ground beetle's carapace with a single bite of it's jaws, and ground beetles are pretty tough. It did the same thing to a second ground beetle a few days later.