Home: 20L vs 10 gallon with topper?

[tripleb]

In your opinion, which is a better housing option for a pair of gerbils: 1) a 20 gallon long aquarium tank or 2) a 10 gallon aquarium tank with a topper?

The main reason I ask is because a local pet store has a Tetra 20L aquarium tank on sale for $20...add $19 for the screen top and I've got a new home for the gerbils for $39 - which seems like a pretty good deal.

My daughter is currently using the Prevue 2005 (dimensions are approximately 22"x14"x14"). She likes it better than the aquarium idea because the gerbils will come to her and sniff her through the cage and she can give them treats through the openings.  However, they throw the bedding everywhere and the 20L would give them about 60 extra square inches of runabout room. The 10 gallon with topper seems like it would give the best of both worlds....room to dig but also fresh air and the ability to interact with my daughter....but many of them get very poor reviews and would be quite a bit more expensive than $39.

Thanks for any and all input.

TripleB

[betty]

If you want to interact with them more and see them a bit clearer, then you have to put up with the mess. Lots of people use these things and their gerbils are fine.

Why not use the cheap tank and find a second hand cage for cheap too and just use the top part instead of the screen? That way you week be able to keep most of the mess inside...

[theia]

We have a similar cage to this (judging from the picture our cage is bigger and it has two wire levels and a wire bridge and plenty of space for wooden bendy bridges to be added too, personally I dislike giving gerbils anything plastic in case they swallow any of it, and with the mixture of wooden bridges and the smooth plastic main floor we've never had any problems with their feet having to walk on wire at times). Ours curently houses 2 of our girls, and we've used it before with three males years ago and they seemed perfectly happy in it, but yes they do cause quite a bit of a mess. Our other three girls are in a small tank with topper, we started them out in the cage and then bought them the tank and topper and upgraded them when we decided to put the other two girls together.

What I have always found is that once any of our gerbils get to live in a cage for a time they suddenly seem to hate anything fully enclosed, if we temporarily put them in a tub or just a tank they investigate for a few minutes then they start frantically leaping to get out and will happily scrabble on your hands and arms for freedom, we had to put the three we moved in a temp tub setup overnight while we waited for their new setup to arrive and they hated it. Once they were in their new tank they still leapt around for freedom until they discovered the cage topper and it dawned on them that they could still stick their little noses and paws out and have a good look around and sniff. They've been fine ever since. The reason I mention this is because should you go for just a tank you may find that your gerbils don't like it/feel more enclosed and cut off than they are used to, if it was me i'd go for a tank and topper as big as you csn afford/have space for.