About Terrarium Station LLC
Terrarium Station LLC is a breeder of rare exotic reptiles and invertebrates based in Arvada, Colorado, just outside Denver, working conservation-first since 2020. We specialise in species that are difficult to source responsibly — day geckos, crocodile skinks, tropical millipedes, Sulawesi rabbit snails and select rare isopods — and we document what we keep rather than simply selling it.
Our photographs illustrate Wikipedia
Images taken by Terrarium Station and contributed to Wikimedia Commons illustrate the Wikipedia articles for Gonatodes daudini, the critically endangered Union Island gecko, and Cnemaspis chanthaburiensis. The Gonatodes daudini article credits Terrarium Station LLC and identifies the animal pictured as captive bred in the United States. Very few keepers can point to their own animals illustrating the scientific record.
What we work with
Our collection centres on species where captive husbandry is still being worked out. Day geckos including Phelsuma klemmeri, Phelsuma standingi, Phelsuma guimbeaui and Phelsuma cepediana. Crocodile skinks — both Tribolonotus gracilis and Tribolonotus novaeguineae. Geckos such as Correlophus ciliatus, Gonatodes annularis, Pseudogekko smaragdinus, Gekko pradapdao and Nephrurus amyae. Tropical millipedes including Alienostreptus bicoloripes and the pink dragon millipede, Desmoxytes planata.
Browse the current collection in the shop, or read husbandry notes in our care guides.
Species without names
A significant part of what we keep has no valid scientific name yet. Several of our millipedes are undescribed Spirostreptid lineages, distinguished only by trade designators like Yellow Leg and Red Leg. Our Sulawesi rabbit snails are Tylomelania species that remain unresolved.
Most databases treat an unidentified animal as missing data. We treat it as a record worth keeping. That is why we built SpeciesVault — an open registry where undescribed and provisionally identified species are first-class entries, with accession numbers, parentage and journals, rather than gaps waiting for a taxonomist.
Captive breeding, where it counts
Our rabbit snails are captive bred. Sulawesi Tylomelania almost always reach the market wild-collected from a lake system already under collection pressure, so captive-produced stock is uncommon and worth asking about. Our Phelsuma klemmeri are captive bred as well — a species listed as Endangered by the IUCN, where provenance is not a marketing line but the difference between supporting a population and drawing from it.
We say plainly which animals are captive bred and which are not. Several of our imported millipedes are field collected, and we label them that way.
Why we hold field-collected founders
Founder stock has to come from somewhere. For species with no established captive population, the first animals are necessarily wild-sourced — and we label them as founders rather than dressing them up as something else. We breed from them, and their offspring are captive bred.
That is the whole point of the work. A species with a stable captive population no longer needs to be taken from the wild to satisfy the hobby. Every founder we breed successfully reduces the pressure on the population it came from. Each accession in SpeciesVault records its origin, its parents and its offspring, so the lineage is documented rather than asserted.
Beyond the shop
We publish husbandry footage on our video channel, contribute photography to Wikimedia Commons, and maintain SpeciesVault as a public record. Get in touch for availability, husbandry questions or wholesale enquiries.
How we keep animals
Our animals are raised in bioactive enclosures — live substrate with its own populations of springtails and isopods breaking down waste, rather than sterile tubs cleaned by hand. It is more work to set up and considerably less work to maintain, and it produces animals that arrive acclimated to a functioning environment rather than a plastic box.
That approach carries into what we sell. The cleanup crews, leaf litter and substrate in our shop are the same materials we use ourselves, and the husbandry we publish is what we actually do rather than a rewritten care sheet.
What we do not claim
We do not describe every animal as captive bred, because not every animal is. We do not use scientific names we cannot stand behind — several of our millipedes are recorded as Spirostreptid sp. because no valid species name exists for them, and a specialist dealer working with the same animals says the same thing. Where a name is unresolved, we say so.
This matters more in invertebrates than most buyers realise. Trade names are inconsistent between sellers, the same animal is sold under several labels, and confident-sounding binomials are frequently wrong. We would rather publish an honest gap than a tidy error.
Common questions
- Where are you based?
- Arvada, Colorado, in the Denver metro area. We ship domestically; contact us for current availability.
- Are your animals captive bred?
- Many are, and we label them individually. Founder animals of species with no established captive population are wild-sourced, and we label those as field collected rather than blurring the two. Our rabbit snails and Phelsuma klemmeri are captive bred.
- Why do you sell animals without a scientific name?
- Because a great many rare invertebrates genuinely have none. An undescribed species is a real animal with a real lineage — it simply has not been formally described yet. We record these under their trade designation and mark the identification as unresolved.
- What is SpeciesVault?
- Our open registry of accession records. Each animal gets a permanent accession number, its origin, its parents and its offspring, so a lineage can be cited rather than claimed. You can browse it at SpeciesVault.
- Do you work with undescribed and rare species specifically?
- Yes. That is the core of the collection — species where captive husbandry is still being established, including undescribed millipedes, rare Phelsuma day geckos, and crocodile skinks.