Digital Social Hour
Dustin Aquatics: He Built a Volcano Terrarium With Fog and “Lava” Lights | DSH #1750
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: How did Dustin transition from bar nights to building terrariums?
I was actually looking for something to do to occupy my time in my mind, but I'd been spending too much time at the bar.
Chapter 2: What are self-sustaining ecosystems and how do they work?
And I was like, I'm just going to go ahead and buy like $500 worth of stuff, which is what I would have pissed away at the bar.
Chapter 3: What role do springtails play in terrarium maintenance?
And that way I had some skin in the game.
Chapter 4: Why are poison dart frogs safe when captive bred?
And then instead of...
know waking up hungover i woke up and worked on my terrarium each morning for 30 40 minutes and that kind of got me on like the right path for the day i had like that feeling of accomplishment you set the tone yeah exactly but more importantly i had like a physical piece of evidence that i spent another day not going getting hammered and then i had an incentive to make sure that my sharp is the next morning to do another you know round of work that's cool
Okay, guys, we got Dustin here.
Chapter 5: How can terrariums serve as a form of therapy?
He got a little wet on the way in Vegas, which is rare.
Man, it was insane. It was like I was in Florida. Monsoon coming in, wind blowing sideways. Got a little cool down, though, for it.
Chapter 6: What content strategies helped Dustin gain millions of views?
Yeah, you caught some very interesting timing, man. It doesn't rain like that here.
Yeah, I didn't think so.
Chapter 7: What are the differences between terrariums, paludariums, and vivariums?
I thought this was a desert.
It is, but picked the one time of the day. Yeah, but so your company is Alternate Aquatics, right?
Correct.
Chapter 8: What innovative features did Dustin include in his volcano terrarium build?
Yes, sir.
Could you explain what you do there?
Yeah. So realistically, it's kind of it's just started as like an in-home hobby type of deal. But right now I'm just building and creating many ecosystems inside of my home. Some of them are self-contained, meaning that they're completely self-sufficient. They don't require any maintenance on them.
And then I got some bigger ones that do require a little bit, but the main goal of my builds is to try to build it as realistic and natural looking as possible with as little maintenance as possible.
So when you say maintenance, some of these require some more hands-on stuff.
A little bit. It just depends. Some of my terrariums have some animals in them. They all do have animals. There's a cleanup crew consisting of springtails. They're these tiny little bugs that eat decaying plant and animal matter. And that, in turn, will create new fertilizer for the plants. But it makes the entire ecosystem self-sufficient and self-cleaning.
But if there's other animals, like I have some poison dart frogs, for example. Whoa. I've got to feed those. What do those eat? They eat flightless fruit flies. Flightless fruit?
What's the point of a fly if you can't fly?
I didn't even know that was a thing. They're a specific breed of flies. You can get two different ones. There's wingless ones, and there's a specific species. I forget the name right off the top of my head. But as long as you keep them under 70 degrees, they don't develop the ability to fly. Yeah.
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