Carolina® Large Choice Chamber and Lid, Black

We bought these to use with our millipedes for a microhabitat preference experiment. I was pleased with the ease of assembly, etc, but we plan on using these long term, over many semesters, for our freshman biology students. The plastic seems to be less sturdy than I would like. Already, a couple of the units are scuffed pretty badly, and a couple are cracked. It appears that the plastic just isnt made to hold up to people repeatedly taking them apart and putting them back together, which is the goal of the lab---to test different environments, therefore needing to assemble different combinations of both clear and black chambers. As I was carefully assembling them for testing, I felt as though I was going to break off the hinges. Also, even with using filter paper to cover the bottom, our sand, soil, and gravel (to mimic difference terrestrial surfaces) scratched the surface of the chambers pretty badly with a few uses, even though the students were careful with placing in the sand/gravel/soil and removing it. The only reason we would buy these in the future is because we really dont have another choice in product that is easily available through our purchasing system, and it looks like I may have to buy more of them to replace the ones that were damaged after one semester of use (approximately 4 uses over the span of a week).