leopard gecko- items i may need to keep him happy

MellowMan24

New member
can roaches fly? just wondering it looks like they have wings
:( i thought roaches would be easier to catch than crickets but my parents wont allow roaches:(

Molly likes the log thing alot! it must be really warm in there! it sucks tho because i cant get her out to get pics other than the one of her head that is the best i can get unless i take pictures of differnt parts of her body.

is the flask from a camera bad for geckos? i dont want to damage their eyes.
 

Sinosauropteryx

New member
Rain water vs. well water

False. Rain water carried more bacteria than well water. Rain water harbors bacteria because: It falls through the sky, going through all the pollution.

Then don't you mean pollution (I.e, chemicals)? Rain water is naturally acidic over the long term. Regardless, the micro-organisms travelling with evaporated water into the atmosphere are usually not dangerous enough to cause a lot of sickness. Rainwater in any place can harbor harmful bacteria like E Coli but these bacteria would need to have come from somewhere not very long ago before they reached the atmosphere. All water has something living in it so bacteria carried in the rain is sort of an indication that there is a source of ground water infected with them too. That includes a well since wells do partake in returning water into the atmosphere. Wells are filled by rainwater anyway so it is sort of the same deal on both sides. The only notable difference is that bacteria can live in ground water long-term so they can wait there until something - or someone - ingests them. There is no natural filtration system that will remove those bacteria. Wells can also tap into underground reservoirs and these can connect to treatment plants, iron and copper mines, and other places that leak chemicals so they can have their share of chemical contaminants.

That's why you're not supposed to eat snowflakes.

Actually, you are not supposed to eat snowflakes because of what happens to them after they fall, like being peed on by a dog or something like that.

"Normally you could drink rainwater without becoming ill.
However, rainwater contains pollutants, soil, plant parts,
insect parts, bacteria, algae, and sometimes radioactive
materials that the rain/snow has washed out of the air.
If filtered with one of the filtering systems that you
can buy in stores nowadays, and then boiled, you could
probably drink the water safely. However, it is safer yet
to get your water from municipal water supplies or from wells
that are frequently tested."
Drinking Rain Water

Looky what I found:

Richard E. Barrans Jr. said:
Since ancient times, the only sources of natural water that are recognized
as safe to drink are rain water and water from deep wells. The trick is
that the rain water must be carefully handled so that it does not become
contaminated. If it runs along the ground, it's anybody's guess what sort
of microbes and toxic elements it will pick up. But if you put a clean bowl
out in the rain to collect the rain water, there's no reason you can't drink
the water from it.

This little beauty came from the same site you pointed ouut, right below the paragraph you quoted.

But if, as you say, the toxicity of the rainwater depends on where the toxic chemicals are coming from (cities in your case) then there are places where the rain does not harbor any chemicals at all. Like out in the country. Regardless of where you got your water, you must still have had to treat it somehow.

Again, not all bacteria are harmful enough to cause illnesses; you probably drank multitudes of bacteria and other micro-organisms when you still lived in the country and did not get sick. If rainwater really was laden with harmful bacteria and other micro-organisms that could cause serious illnesses, then there would be epidemics pretty much anywhere we went. As I pointed out earlier, that is clearly not the case. Epidemics do happen, but people are not dying every time they drink collected rainwater. Animals are not dying from drinking out of puddles, water holes, and other small, closed bodies of water that are filled by rain. This being said, the only thing you really need to be concerned about are the chemicals in the water. Live away from the pollution, and you're pretty much good to go.You can't really say the same thing about well water because bacteria can live there for a long time - bacteria originated in water, after all - so you still need to filter your well water. Hence my statement is still correct.



Allee, while this is turning out to be an interesting debate, I think if we want to continue it we should start our own thread or move it to PM so that we don't continue to derail MellowMan24's thread. What do you say?
 

MellowMan24

New member
Allee said:
hey i dont mind the debate. when i here all of this it sounds like smart people that dont know how to fight are debating instead
:fight::fight::fight:(words do hurt:lol::crackup:)
if you guys are starting another thread to debate this in tell me the name.

how often do geckos drink?
 

MellowMan24

New member
urgent!!!

molly wont come out of the log!!:( and when i fed her a little while ago she only ate 2mealworms and 2 crickets then went back to sleep:(. meanwhile Leila ate alot and walks around at night because when i woke up in the morning she was in the humid hide (! i know they are nocturnal and that this is good !) molly went in the log the first night i got them and i dont think she has been out ever sence.
i'm going to try to fee her more later tonight if she does not eat then i'm going to try a and get her out.

is there a way to try and lure her out with out taking the log out? maybe nudger her toward a hole? i dont want to stress her out.

at night i'm going to put some calcium around the holes so when i wake up i can see if she gets out at night.
 

Allee Toler

Member
Let her settle. She's probably still freaked about the move! If I was an itty bitty reptile who had this HUGE hand (or HUGE pair of tongs) coming after me pinching my food, I'd think he was trying to eat my food! So since he's so big, I'll just stay hidden. Maybe he'll drop some food before he leaves. Lol. But seriously, think about the way they think. Try leaving a little bowl next to the hide with a couple worms in it. She may think the "big scary predator" missed some food and left. Mine were terrified to eat in front of my the first few weeks.


As for the debate. There is no debate. Everything ANYONE says questioning him he turns into a fiasco. I'm not even going to read what he typed. I know I was right so there's no point. He's just trying to change things around and make me look bad by trying to make me seem stupid. ;] Watch, he'll quote this too and try to prove me wrong. Lol.
 

Riverside Reptiles

Administrator (HMFIC)
Actually you both make correct and incorrect points about the rainwater vs. well water. But I'm too tired to go into it. I do agree that this debate either needs to end or be continued in a new thread of it's own though.

Allee, if his posts bother you, please remember that you can put him on ignore and you just won't see his posts any more.
 

MellowMan24

New member
Let her settle. She's probably still freaked about the move! If I was an itty bitty reptile who had this HUGE hand (or HUGE pair of tongs) coming after me pinching my food, I'd think he was trying to eat my food! So since he's so big, I'll just stay hidden. Maybe he'll drop some food before he leaves. Lol. But seriously, think about the way they think. Try leaving a little bowl next to the hide with a couple worms in it. She may think the "big scary predator" missed some food and left. Mine were terrified to eat in front of my the first few weeks.

ok sorry for being so worried i'll put some food out side the hide (i hope Leila wont eat it :lol: ) could i empty the calcium dish so i could use that to night? should i use mealworms? they might get out of the bowl. i have some baby food would that be good? i think its chicken vegetable.
 

Allee Toler

Member
Baby food left out can actually go bad. But it's worth a shot. Just don't leave it in there over 12 hours or so. I usually put it in for a few hours, which she licks it clean. Lol.

Do you have a tupperware container you can cut? This is a simple make-shift food bowl that gives her running room to catch the worms.

I cut a U out of one side, the bottom of the U about one inch off the floor. I put a little calcium powder in the container, with about 20 worms in it. Because it's so big, the worms can scatter, and will dust themselves roaming around. Put the opening side right outside her hide, but not covering the whole side. So she can go elsewhere. With it having such high sides, she may feel that she's alone with the food. My oldest won't eat anything unless if she's 100% positive her food is only hers. Put a rock, or whatever you can find, outside the U so she can step up into it. She'll get curious at night, and find a bunch of worms crawling around.

I've noticed that superworms move a lot more with this container, mealies just fall asleep I guess you can say, but they do that with any container. And phoenixworms wiggle a lot as well.

It's worth a shot. That's how I got both of mine to eat openly. Now Lucie eats whatever she can catch and isn't picky. After a while of using the big container, I worked it down in size. Cutting the top to make it more visible from all sides, then putting a ceramic bowl inside it (the kind you can buy for mealies) so they still feed out of the container, then just cutting away parts of the container until all that's left is the bowl with worms. Now Lucie eats anything that goes in the bowl. She's a more confident eater.

OR you can wait it out, and see if she eats on her own. Lol. That's just the route I took, and it worked great for me, well, worked great for Lucie. =D
 

MellowMan24

New member
:yahoo::yahoo::yahoo::yahoo: shes out!!!! i put some mealies in a old cleaned hamster dish and put in the tank turned out my bed room light went downstairs for an hour came up just now and ....bamo shes in the humid hide! but no mealies were gone the dish might be too tall. should i leave it in till tomorrow morning?....maybe i can finnally get a good pic of her tomorrow (my battery died to day i for got to turn it off:()
it just makes he happy to know she could get out.
 

Sinosauropteryx

New member
Unanswered questions

Ecch, my internet connection was not agreeing with me all day today so I was not able to get this posted sooner. Your most current issue with Molly and the log sounds completely normal at this stage. All lizards need atleast a week to get used to their new surroundings so just give it time. If she eats and poops then you'll know she's alive :coverlaugh:

And now for your other questions:

so you keep your temps the same all the time. i can see why it wouldn't hurt.

It might not hurt too much but, just as nocturnal geckos are attuned to changes in the amount of light outside, they also rely on temperature differences to stimulate their foraging activity. Most (if not all) geckos will only forage when the temperature drops a few degrees because this most often tells them it's night time. That is why it is very often suggested that you let your temperature drop at night. All lizards rely on differences in light and heat to tell them when to sleep and when to wake up. So keeping your room temperature unchanged throughout the 24 hour cycle isn't too bad if the temperature is warm enough, your gecko might eventually get confused and you might begin to see some abnormal activity schedules, like foraging for bugs in the middle of the afternoon.

i have a UVB Bulb for day and a night bulb for the winter incase it gets too cold

I hate to say this now but leopard geckos, like just about every other specis of nocturnal gecko, do not need UV. At all. They use calcium and release D3 into their bodies in other ways as a result of adapting to a nocturnal lifestyle. And that UVB bulb is not going to give them the heat they need anyway. You need either an infra-red heat bulb or an Under Tank Heater (UTH) to supply heat, along with a good constant ambient air temperature in the surrounding room.

can roaches fly? just wondering it looks like they have wings
:( i thought roaches would be easier to catch than crickets but my parents wont allow roaches:(

No, I don't think any of the commercially bred feeder roaches can fly. I am not completely sure about that, though - maybe B. lateralis can fly - so I would wait until someone more experienced with roaches can answer your question.

Probably the reason why your parents don't like roaches is because of their appearance, the fact that they can chew on wood and other things common in the house, and that they can dirty a place pretty quickly with their faeces, eggs and dead bodies and possibly carry diseases when they come into contact with them. But I have heard that roaches don't smell as bad as crickets do so there's a bonus.

is the flask from a camera bad for geckos? i dont want to damage their eyes.

You mean the flash? Quite possibly, though I don't notice any sight impairment in any of my lizards and I have used the flash atleast once when I tried to take pictures of them. If you are using a digital camera, you should be able to turn the flash off. But if you are using a regular camera, you might be out of luck.

how often do geckos drink?

Depends on where they come from. Leopard geckos can go for longer periods without drinking because they live in arid environments but you will still want to have a water dish available for them at all times. Just in case they get thirsty. My white-lined gecko Pepe is an arboreal tropical forest gecko so, even though I keep a full water dish available for him at all times, he is more likely to be getting his water from the droplets left over from whenever I mist his terrarium so, in that regard, misting the terrarium is very important.

Oh, and congratulations on getting Molly out of the log thingy :D Just saw that post now :oops:
 

Allee Toler

Member
GiGi is diurnal. Lucie is nocturnal. They're in the same tank, with the same settings. Right now, my UTH is off. We're on another heat wave, the tank is at 89F on both sides with no heat. I put in 30 medium crickets last night before bed. Lucie jumped out and ate a ton, GiGi slept. This morning when I got up, GiGi was out hunting. Now there's like 2 crickets left, and the sun set, so Lucie's on the prowl again.

I've had no ill effects with my reptiles for not dropping their temps. It's too cold at night to drop them, and it's toooooo hot during the day to keep the UTH on. At night it's in the 50's, during the day it's in the upper 90's outside, and lower 90's in the tank. By the time I turn on the UTH at night, it levels out the temps to be the same.

I've always done this in the hot months (about 5 months out of the year) with no problems.

Everyone over exaggerates how fragile these animals are. Mind you they survive in the wild just fine. Drinking river water, eating whatever parasite infested insects they find, inbreeding when there's no other mates. Living on rocks and sand. They're not going to die easily. If they needed their environment to be EXACT, then they would of died thousands of years ago due to climate change. All animals need food, all animals need water, all animals need certain temps, all animals need shelter. If you want a realistic and 100% instinctual reptile, put it in a man made ecosystem. With predators, and fluctuating climate throughout the year, drought, weeks with no food, and not touch it. Ever. You don't need to shelter them. They have immune systems. They're stronger than people give them credit for. Hell, my cousin rescued a leo that was kept in room temps it's whole life and she was 17 when he got her. Had decent weight, ate regularly, and adapted to her given climate. She's still alive to this day, and it's been over 3 years.

So no, I'm not going to "make sure" that everything runs according to what "everyone" thinks is best. My temps stay at 90F throughout the day and night. That's what they're staying at. It's not a necessity to drop the temps. If it was, my geckos would be dead. If they can live without it, then it's not a necessity. That's how I see it. Food, water, shelter, vitamins, calcium, warmer temps-- Necessity. A DROP in the temps? Not a necessity. It will naturally occur in most homes at night. But in mine it doesn't during the summer.

Read my post. Don't reply. I know you're going to quote every single line separately and "analyze" it trying to make me sound like a moron like you always seem to do to everyone. THINK about what I said. Not try to debate it. This isn't a debate forum. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. People reply to thread with their concepts, and their experiences, not written hard facts. So STOP challenging everyone's opinions trying to push it up against yours to see whose is better. It's childish. This isn't "my gecko's better than your gecko".

Sorry I replied like this in your thread MellowMan24. I couldn't keep shut this time. I'm going to block him now so I don't see his replies to me anymore. I've made my point.

I can't wait to see pictures of Leila and Molly. Better pictures that is. Lol. Hopefully they warm up to you soon!
 

MellowMan24

New member
Read my post. Don't reply. I know you're going to quote every single line separately and "analyze" it trying to make me sound like a moron like you always seem to do to everyone. THINK about what I said. Not try to debate it. This isn't a debate forum. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. People reply to thread with their concepts, and their experiences, not written hard facts. So STOP challenging everyone's opinions trying to push it up against yours to see whose is better. It's childish. This isn't "my gecko's better than your gecko".

Sorry I replied like this in your thread MellowMan24. I couldn't keep shut this time. I'm going to block him now so I don't see his replies to me anymore. I've made my point.

I can't wait to see pictures of Leila and Molly. Better pictures that is. Lol. Hopefully they warm up to you soon!
i agree. i dont think that droping the temp is some thing you need to do.
i have some mealies sitting out right now and i going to try and get some better pics today.
thanks for all of the help for the past week or so.
 

Sinosauropteryx

New member
Constant temperatures

@ MellowMan24: Can't wait for those photos :D The ones you have already taken look really good so far. Leila looks beautiful (but then I have a thing for normals). Are you still using the log hide you showed me earlier? The one you originally wanted to use for a humid hide.

@ Allee: Just a few things I wanted to point out in your last post. If you have already blocked me then I don't have to expect another snit-fit from you (thank the gods). If you haven't, a few things to think about before you make another one of your "points."

GiGi is diurnal. Lucie is nocturnal. They're in the same tank, with the same settings. Right now, my UTH is off. We're on another heat wave, the tank is at 89F on both sides with no heat. I put in 30 medium crickets last night before bed. Lucie jumped out and ate a ton, GiGi slept. This morning when I got up, GiGi was out hunting. Now there's like 2 crickets left, and the sun set, so Lucie's on the prowl again.

I've had no ill effects with my reptiles for not dropping their temps.

I never said anything about it being harmful, only that it would be abnormal. Leopard geckos in the wild are nocturnal - or at the least crepuscular (awake at dawn and/or dusk) - so a leopard gecko happens to be awake in the middle of the afternoon is showing abnormal sleeping and waking patterns. As long as it's not actually harming the gecko in any way, I don't see why you couldn't do it. Think is, many herp keepers want to emulate the natural environment their lizard would be living in if it had been wild. That is why I brought it up. If you don't mind obstructing it by keeping your temperatures the same 24 hours a day then I'm not stopping you so I don't know what you are complaining about.

Mind you they survive in the wild just fine.

Yeah, of course they do. Not on nice comfy UTHs, balmy temps 24/7, and hand-raised bugs prepared for them with everything they need already added and just enough for them to be full. No foul weather or predators either. Conditions in the wild can be a lot more harsh than those we give them in captivity. But they do survive, believe it or not, so why we would be concerned about them in captivity is beyond me.

So yeah, I agree with you there.

If I may point something out, though: a 24 hour constant temperature in the low 90's sounds pretty ideal to me. If I were a leopard gecko, I would much rather live in your tank than endure the cold nights of western Asia. Which is kinda funny if you think about it because you sound so much like a naturalist to me. Someone who wants to emulate the natural environment for her leopard geckos rather than spoil them. If you are so passionate about naturalism, why are you so concerned with keeping your leo's tank temperatures so high all the time?

Read my post. Don't reply. I know you're going to quote every single line separately and "analyze" it trying to make me sound like a moron like you always seem to do to everyone. THINK about what I said. Not try to debate it. This isn't a debate forum. It's not about who's right and who's wrong. People reply to thread with their concepts, and their experiences, not written hard facts. So STOP challenging everyone's opinions trying to push it up against yours to see whose is better. It's childish. This isn't "my gecko's better than your gecko".

...are we in some sort of competition here? The last time I checked (about, oh, two of your replies ago) we were having a decent conversation and I thought it would stay that way until I read that reply following Ethan's post. I am not trying to compete with anyone here. I am trying to discuss topics that I find interesting and explore other people's points of view. And I don't understand why you have a problem with that. But that is beside the point. This is a public board and, as long as I am not breaking the rules, I can pretty much say whatever I want here. As can you. If you don't want to put up with any more of my posts, then stop replying to them and turn that Ignore function on, as Ethan said.

I'm not going to quote any more so you can give it a rest. Just *please*, if you do want to reply, post something meaningful. No more immature snit-fits. Nobody likes reading those except for entertainment and I have too much respect for you right now to let you drop to such a level.
 
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Allee Toler

Member
i agree. i dont think that droping the temp is some thing you need to do.
i have some mealies sitting out right now and i going to try and get some better pics today.
thanks for all of the help for the past week or so.

When you try to get new pictures of them, put your camera on Macro. Or is it micro.. Whatever it is. It focuses on little things and makes it not blurry. Lol. I have two digital camera. One set to Macro, with no flash for my geckos. And one that has no setting for every day use. =D Whenever I read Leila, I think of futurama.
 
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Riverside Reptiles

Administrator (HMFIC)
You guys are both being immature IMO. Quit quoting each other and just leave each other alone. Agree to disagree. It's that simple. Everything doesn't HAVE to be a debate. I'm getting sick of having to patrol your posts to make sure that you're not going overboard. Out of 15,000 members, you're the only two I'm having issues with currently. Get it together or I'm going to start giving out infractions for forum disruption.

Edit to add: the above is directed to BOTH of you.
 

MellowMan24

New member
lol i kinda didnt want to name her that because of futurama lol but i thought what it ment in Hebrew suited her.
 

Allee Toler

Member
lol i kinda didnt want to name her that because of futurama lol but i thought what it ment in Hebrew suited her.

Yeah, it's a pretty name. =D

I was just watching the movie, the one with the egg star thing (I'm not huge into the series but my fiance is) two nights ago. You know they renewed the contract with the original cast for two more seasons? Lol. Kind of Off Topic. Not really, well yeah it is. But it's your thread. So your rules. =P
 
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