# What would be the best way to sterilize a piece off wood to big for the oven?



## Carolina Vivariums (Oct 27, 2016)

I have a cool piece of wood I want to use in a vivarium but it's to big to fit in my oven...what would be the best way to make it safe to use?


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## cam1941 (Jan 16, 2014)

Unfortunately there is no way to completely sterilize wood.

To avoid things like ants that may have a nest inside you can keep it under water for 2 weeks. That will kill any ants and I suppose termites that may be inside. 

This is an easy mistake, I've seen tiny ant colonies in cork before that took me forever to notice and I was lucky I had to wait to use it.

If you have a large enough pot you can boil. I used to do this for my aquariums in a huge pot that I got at a restaurant supply. 

Other than that, thoroughly rinse and quarantine in a dry place away from nature. 

I've seen people used bleach solutions which I wouldn't suggest since the bleach will go into the wood and cannot be removed. More importantly its not worth the risks since it will not completely sterilize the wood anyway.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Soaking it for two weeks may not be enough as it depends on how fast the water can penetrate the wood. People forget that small crevices and tunnels can hold air for long periods of time protecting anything sheltering in them (and this is before you consider that some things like some termites can seal their tunnels. 

The problem with all of the measures that people recommend is that they they are missing the point that is needed to actually do something and that is time. The treatment is useless unless you can penetrate the wood all the way to the core. If you don't treat the material all the way through to the core, then you might as well not do anything else at all which is why sometimes the simplest way is just to let it sit dry in a warm location for a very very long time. 

some comments 

Ed


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## boabab95 (Nov 5, 2009)

Ed said:


> If you don't treat the material all the way through to the core, then you might as well not do anything else at all which is why sometimes the simplest way is just to let it sit dry in a warm location for a very very long time.
> 
> some comments
> 
> Ed


By a very very long time, do you mean 6 months? a year? 2 years? I usually do this with the leaves, and at this point, I'm letting them sit for 2 years before using (not on purpose, just not needing them as often as I thought).


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## Dane (Aug 19, 2004)

Carolina Vivariums said:


> I have a cool piece of wood I want to use in a vivarium but it's to big to fit in my oven...what would be the best way to make it safe to use?
> 
> 
> Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


Maybe a local university or lab might have an autoclave large enough to process it? Granted you would have to explain why you need a big, sterile chunk of wood...


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## cam1941 (Jan 16, 2014)

Interesting especially about the termites sealing tunnels, didn't know that... But I was told that this method is supposed to work because you are essentially starving the ant colony not drowning it. Obviously the water will never displace any trapped air.

Is this not true or is this not long enough?



Ed said:


> Soaking it for two weeks may not be enough as it depends on how fast the water can penetrate the wood. People forget that small crevices and tunnels can hold air for long periods of time protecting anything sheltering in them (and this is before you consider that some things like some termites can seal their tunnels.
> 
> The problem with all of the measures that people recommend is that they they are missing the point that is needed to actually do something and that is time. The treatment is useless unless you can penetrate the wood all the way to the core. If you don't treat the material all the way through to the core, then you might as well not do anything else at all which is why sometimes the simplest way is just to let it sit dry in a warm location for a very very long time.
> 
> ...


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

I have to question the 14 day period then as it can take a lot longer for a colony to starve to death. There are multiple studies on food dispersal in colonies in laboratories where they starved them for 14 days or more as part of the study and the colonies did not collapse. 

I only scanned this article but if I got the gist correctly, you'd have to submerge it potentially for more than 140 days. 

Lachaud, J. P., et al. "Lipid storage by major workers and starvation resistance in the ant Pheidole pallidula (Hymenoptera, Formicidae)." Biology and evolution of social insects (1992): 153-160.

some comments 

Ed


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## easttex (Oct 29, 2012)

Back when I worked at a pet shop, the owner kept a horse trough in the back. When he found a big price of wood he liked, he'd weigh it down with rocks in the trough and soak it for a long time in a solution potassium permanganate and water. He claimed it would sanitze it, help pull some of the tannins out, and kill off any bugs in it. He'd done this for years without issue so I accepted his hypothesis.

FWIW, he said he'd purchased the permanganate at a local pharmacy. 

It might be worth a try of you have the time and place to soak the wood.

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## Lisaxaphona (Nov 2, 2016)

This is probably a stupid question, but have you tried putting it in diagonally?

Depending on the shape of your piece, and what you plan to do with it, you can just cut it. Say you are going to attach it with great stuff to a viv, well if you cut it so you can put it in the oven, it won't make a huge difference because you can line up the pieces in the expanding foam, and you'd never know it was cut.

If you use a thin blade that doesn't take off a lot of the wood when cutting, (which results in a super clean cut) you could use non toxic wood glue to glue it back together. Even if you don't plan on gluing the wood in, it won't be very noticeable. Wood glue is very strong, and once dry that joint will be the strongest point on the entire piece.

The reason I say to use a thin blade, is because the larger the blade, the more wood it will take off and it may not lone up as well. Preferably you'd want to cut it in a place the has a similar sized thickness, so when the 1/8 of an inch is removed, it will still line up perfectly.

If you are willing to wait to use it, putting it in the sun on hot days for a long time (months? I'm not positive how long) will clean it. I've sun bleached a ram skull this way by putting it on my roof in the summer.

Can you show us a picture of it?

I'm impatient, so I look at it this way. Not using it at all (or not for a few months at least) or cut it, bake it, glue it, and use it immediately.


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## cam1941 (Jan 16, 2014)

Very cool, thanks for looking that up… I was wondering if there was a study done on that. 

The only flaw in applying it here is that it doesn’t take into account the extreme stress of partially flooding the nest and the flight response and chaos that that would cause.

In my case the ants died after the recommended 2 weeks. I may have just been lucky, YMMV...




Ed said:


> I have to question the 14 day period then as it can take a lot longer for a colony to starve to death. There are multiple studies on food dispersal in colonies in laboratories where they starved them for 14 days or more as part of the study and the colonies did not collapse.
> 
> I only scanned this article but if I got the gist correctly, you'd have to submerge it potentially for more than 140 days.
> 
> ...


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## npaull (May 8, 2005)

To approach this from a different angle...

THe concept and worry over "sterility" for vivarium furnishings has always seemed kind of silly to me. This is a vivarium, not a sterile surgical field. 

Clean the object as best you can. Make a good effort to remove any macrofauna (snails, millipedes, etc can be a pain). But beyond that? Don't worry about it. The frogs can handle the overwhelming majority of microorganisms that you could throw at them. And really what's the WORST case scenario? Your tank gets some snails or nemerteans? Good luck keeping them out anyway if you keep the tank for more than a few months.


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## Lisaxaphona (Nov 2, 2016)

npaull said:


> To approach this from a different angle...
> 
> THe concept and worry over "sterility" for vivarium furnishings has always seemed kind of silly to me. This is a vivarium, not a sterile surgical field.
> 
> Clean the object as best you can. Make a good effort to remove any macrofauna (snails, millipedes, etc can be a pain). But beyond that? Don't worry about it. The frogs can handle the overwhelming majority of microorganisms that you could throw at them. And really what's the WORST case scenario? Your tank gets some snails or nemerteans? Good luck keeping them out anyway if you keep the tank for more than a few months.


 Funny you say that. A few days ago I was sharing what I read about sterilization for reptiles with my boyfriend, he basically said what you just did, but in way simpler terms.

"20 years ago people would just throw the wood right in, the snakes were fine."


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Lisaxaphona said:


> Funny you say that. A few days ago I was sharing what I read about sterilization for reptiles with my boyfriend, he basically said what you just did, but in way simpler terms.
> 
> "20 years ago people would just throw the wood right in, the snakes were fine."


This is basically true but you don't want to reuse materials (such as wood, bark, etc) in with a new animal as this can be an excellent method to pass along various pathogens (coccidians etc) but you have to also keep in mind that virtually all of the suggested treatments do not remove or eliminate these problems so the best practice method is to discard (double bag into the proper waste stream do not compost or dump outside). 

some comments 

Ed


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## Dane (Aug 19, 2004)

npaull said:


> To approach this from a different angle...
> 
> THe concept and worry over "sterility" for vivarium furnishings has always seemed kind of silly to me. This is a vivarium, not a sterile surgical field.
> 
> Clean the object as best you can. Make a good effort to remove any macrofauna (snails, millipedes, etc can be a pain). But beyond that? Don't worry about it. The frogs can handle the overwhelming majority of microorganisms that you could throw at them. And really what's the WORST case scenario? Your tank gets some snails or nemerteans? Good luck keeping them out anyway if you keep the tank for more than a few months.


Nothing wrong with that approach Nate, but from a purely anecdotal perspective (which Ed hates), I've been heat-treating my wood, leaves and substrates, as well as bleaching my plants before use for almost my entire time in the hobby, and I have never once seen a nemertean, snail, slug, millipede, or centipede in any of my vivs. Then again it could just be 12 years of good luck.


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## xxohmycaptainxx (Dec 10, 2010)

Ed said:


> The problem with all of the measures that people recommend is that they they are missing the point that is needed to actually do something and that is time. The treatment is useless unless you can penetrate the wood all the way to the core. *If you don't treat the material all the way through to the core, then you might as well not do anything else at all which is why sometimes the simplest way is just to let it sit dry in a warm location for a very very long time. *
> 
> Ed


This! Best piece of advice. I used to regularly collect beech tree branches to use in my aquariums, back when I used to be big into the hobby, and the best method of processing was to just let them sit in a very warm and dry place for 6+ months, then bake for 3 hours at 250*F.


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## cam1941 (Jan 16, 2014)

This is good advice, and I think the problem is the word sterile... Just think how well a sterile fish tank would work out.

We can however use some of the tried and true methods, many mentioned above, to keep some of the larger more obvious pests out of our tanks and even then your never going to be 100% safe.







Dane said:


> Nothing wrong with that approach Nate, but from a purely anecdotal perspective (which Ed hates), I've been heat-treating my wood, leaves and substrates, as well as bleaching my plants before use for almost my entire time in the hobby, and I have never once seen a nemertean, snail, slug, millipede, or centipede in any of my vivs. Then again it could just be 12 years of good luck.


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