Life expectancy in Uroplatus sp.males ?
- Thread starter inguma
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Salzy
New member
The Uroplatus book by Svatek and Van Duin says 4 years, but I'm sure they live longer than that if you have really good husbandry and are careful with them.
We have a female that we got 3 years ago and she was an adult then already...who knows how old she was before she even came to the country.
We have a female that we got 3 years ago and she was an adult then already...who knows how old she was before she even came to the country.
pakinjak
Member
I think this is true is general and we haven't mentioned it thus far, but husbandry (at least here in the states) is still such that it might be hard to tell when you've lost a Uroplatus due to old age. They can have so many problems, and sometimes die of who knows what. I would love to hear first hand experience from some of the old-timers around here what the longest they've kept one is.
Now to the female question- You're gonna have a harder time keeping them alive than the males, there's just such a huge demand on them from the laying experience. I'd be surprised if they live more than a season or two in the wild. Who knows in the trade, but all things being equal I'd think it would be less than the males.
Now to the female question- You're gonna have a harder time keeping them alive than the males, there's just such a huge demand on them from the laying experience. I'd be surprised if they live more than a season or two in the wild. Who knows in the trade, but all things being equal I'd think it would be less than the males.
uroplatus99
New member
I have kept henkeli in the past (WC) for almost 6 years. I gave them away, and do not know how much longer they lived past that point.
As for the females... I have often wondered how much stress we put on them in captivity. Some of the things I have pondered in the past where:
How often do they encounter a male for mating? Because we house or keep them close by in our husbandry, how does this play with females laying eggs as frequent as they do? I know that most of my WC animals (the only exception is my female guentheri) took more than 2 years to acclimate and start producing good eggs. I know that the biggest part of this is climate change being in opposite seasons of Madagascar, but a lot of stress can be forced upon these animals if not in their natural habitat.
How much stress do they receive from our personal day to day interactions with them? Dogs barking, human traffic around the enclosures… all this has to add up as well. (This is something I feel that assist in CB Uroplatus being hardier, simply because they don’t feel threatened by their surroundings)
How often do they feed and get the nutrient for egg production in the wild? Sometimes mother nature assist in this, and I would like to think that in their natural setting, if food isn’t abundant, then they just don’t lay as frequent.
The large percent of us keepers don’t really know for sure (just out of documentation and what first hand information we can get out of folks) how the climate in Madagascar really affects Uroplatus. I would think that they were designed for it, and live life best in an area optimal for their existence.
Just my opinion, not really facts here.
D.B.Johnson
New member
I have had a male ebanaui that started to decline around six years of age. I presently have a phantasticus male who is starting to show the same symptoms of the ebanui one. He is past six years old. I think that for the small species they can be considered pretty old at six. I think I remember reading someone on this forum who said they had a phant that was eight years old. I can't remember who that was off the top of my head. I personally believe that would be an exceptionally long lived one.
miguel camacho!
New member
To elaborate on Silas' comment, I agree that we just cannot know the ecological context of any of these species because...well...the published scientific research is primarily in regards to evolution and systematics. Now I find the occasional general article that includes a little bit on their natural history (such as an older issue of Reptiles that mentions U. lineatus being found in inventories of canopy faunal surveys), but those remarks are few and far between.
A good question you bring up is in regards to the energetics behind reproduction and what is realistically obtained by wild animals and how does that translate to oogenesis/oviposition in the wild. Once again I'll revert to a rattlesnake example (since that's my primary expertise regarding actual research), but captive C. adamanteus can and do reproduce annually. Wild individuals, however, do not. They do not even reproduce every other year. They'll typically reproduce every 3+ years. Once again, they are not geckos, specifically the geckos we speak of. However, it gives us an idea of how captive husbandry and propagation allows keepers to manage animals to produce in a way that simply does not happen in the wild. The specifics behind the reproductive physiology of rattlesnakes is largely unknown. But it's fairly obvious to us now that we can manipulate animals to produce more to our benefit as keepers than to their own. Not that this is our goal, just that we can. I hadn't thought of it before you mentioned it here, but I think that's a fantastic idea you put out there. Consider that alongside the concept that many people blindly believe that the captive life ensures a longer, healthier life (which I'd suggest is far from the truth). The fact is that with our captive reptiles, we rarely have the opportunity to contrast with free, wild animals to examine exactly what the differences in life and health could be. Rattlesnakes are known to live in captivity 30+ years. I do not know the specifics of the individuals that set records for longevity in captivity (I do know scientific journals used to keep records of longevity for various species from zoos/museums, don't know if they do that so much anymore), but my guess is that a captive lifestyle most often results in a less healthy individual. While they may be parasite free, they often suffer from various maladies, some of which are common but remain mysterious. Their wild and free counterparts, however, deal with the stresses of parasites, uncertain interactions with predators/prey/environment, and so on. But if you think about it...rather than all of those stresses of being wild wearing a gecko down and resulting in a shorter lifespan than the captive gecko...maybe that's what makes them more resilient. You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Anyway...
I could go on forever talking about this. I better get some gecko research going once I finish grad school, I hope I can figure out ways to entice funding for Uroplatus ecology research! So many questions and it seems like all the journals give us on the genus has practically nothing to do with ecology!
To remark on one of your questions, I cannot say anything with certainty, but I can say that it's difficult at best (impossible is probably more appropriate) for us to fully understand such things as chemosensation in other animals. Like a drop of blood in the water for a shark or a missing child's scent trail for a Police bloodhound...we can only interpret that level of sensation in words because we have nothing that compares to the acuity of those senses in other animals. Pheromones act in a similar way to those drops of blood and missing child smells (ok, I'll admit that sounds creepy). But this is something many animals use to track one another. We have no way of detecting these pheromones, but we know they're there. We've seen the textbook example of the elaborate, feather-like antennae various male moths carry. However, pheromone transmission/reception in other (most?) animals are much less obvious (and sometimes not even visible to the naked eye). With rattlesnakes, for instance, courtship and copulation is seasonal. I used to collect data on a population that exists at very low densities. Low enough that I would find less than 10 in a year of very intensive field work (partly because when you love herps and you do research on herps, your free time is spent doing work pro bono). But guess what. I wasn't really responsible for finding some of those few snakes each year. The snakes I would track would bring me to the snakes they would court. Sometimes traveling a mile or so in a day (that's a long movement for a snake, but not unheard of for breeding males). We know snakes have some incredible chemosensory ability packed into that slender, little, forked tongue. It does more than sense scent trails left by prey. I'm sure you've noticed male geckos (Uroplatus or otherwise) licking like mad as they court females. In this context, I'm willing to entertain the idea that the behavior might play a role in more than just picking up pheromones in the immediate vicinity of the male, but I'd suggest that it's one of the primary roles (at least at that point in time). Without spitting out too much more superfluous detail, Uroplatus, like many other taxa, can detect one another over longer distances than we can imagine. The strength of the signal required to elicit a response to move great horizontal distances? I don't know, but I'd love to find out!
And if I can reiterate something I've always believed...the best you can do to maximize your success with the keeping and breeding of just about anything is to do your best to mimic the conditions the species encounters in the wild, and that includes changing certain variables in the environment from time to time.
A good question you bring up is in regards to the energetics behind reproduction and what is realistically obtained by wild animals and how does that translate to oogenesis/oviposition in the wild. Once again I'll revert to a rattlesnake example (since that's my primary expertise regarding actual research), but captive C. adamanteus can and do reproduce annually. Wild individuals, however, do not. They do not even reproduce every other year. They'll typically reproduce every 3+ years. Once again, they are not geckos, specifically the geckos we speak of. However, it gives us an idea of how captive husbandry and propagation allows keepers to manage animals to produce in a way that simply does not happen in the wild. The specifics behind the reproductive physiology of rattlesnakes is largely unknown. But it's fairly obvious to us now that we can manipulate animals to produce more to our benefit as keepers than to their own. Not that this is our goal, just that we can. I hadn't thought of it before you mentioned it here, but I think that's a fantastic idea you put out there. Consider that alongside the concept that many people blindly believe that the captive life ensures a longer, healthier life (which I'd suggest is far from the truth). The fact is that with our captive reptiles, we rarely have the opportunity to contrast with free, wild animals to examine exactly what the differences in life and health could be. Rattlesnakes are known to live in captivity 30+ years. I do not know the specifics of the individuals that set records for longevity in captivity (I do know scientific journals used to keep records of longevity for various species from zoos/museums, don't know if they do that so much anymore), but my guess is that a captive lifestyle most often results in a less healthy individual. While they may be parasite free, they often suffer from various maladies, some of which are common but remain mysterious. Their wild and free counterparts, however, deal with the stresses of parasites, uncertain interactions with predators/prey/environment, and so on. But if you think about it...rather than all of those stresses of being wild wearing a gecko down and resulting in a shorter lifespan than the captive gecko...maybe that's what makes them more resilient. You know, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Anyway...
I could go on forever talking about this. I better get some gecko research going once I finish grad school, I hope I can figure out ways to entice funding for Uroplatus ecology research! So many questions and it seems like all the journals give us on the genus has practically nothing to do with ecology!
To remark on one of your questions, I cannot say anything with certainty, but I can say that it's difficult at best (impossible is probably more appropriate) for us to fully understand such things as chemosensation in other animals. Like a drop of blood in the water for a shark or a missing child's scent trail for a Police bloodhound...we can only interpret that level of sensation in words because we have nothing that compares to the acuity of those senses in other animals. Pheromones act in a similar way to those drops of blood and missing child smells (ok, I'll admit that sounds creepy). But this is something many animals use to track one another. We have no way of detecting these pheromones, but we know they're there. We've seen the textbook example of the elaborate, feather-like antennae various male moths carry. However, pheromone transmission/reception in other (most?) animals are much less obvious (and sometimes not even visible to the naked eye). With rattlesnakes, for instance, courtship and copulation is seasonal. I used to collect data on a population that exists at very low densities. Low enough that I would find less than 10 in a year of very intensive field work (partly because when you love herps and you do research on herps, your free time is spent doing work pro bono). But guess what. I wasn't really responsible for finding some of those few snakes each year. The snakes I would track would bring me to the snakes they would court. Sometimes traveling a mile or so in a day (that's a long movement for a snake, but not unheard of for breeding males). We know snakes have some incredible chemosensory ability packed into that slender, little, forked tongue. It does more than sense scent trails left by prey. I'm sure you've noticed male geckos (Uroplatus or otherwise) licking like mad as they court females. In this context, I'm willing to entertain the idea that the behavior might play a role in more than just picking up pheromones in the immediate vicinity of the male, but I'd suggest that it's one of the primary roles (at least at that point in time). Without spitting out too much more superfluous detail, Uroplatus, like many other taxa, can detect one another over longer distances than we can imagine. The strength of the signal required to elicit a response to move great horizontal distances? I don't know, but I'd love to find out!
And if I can reiterate something I've always believed...the best you can do to maximize your success with the keeping and breeding of just about anything is to do your best to mimic the conditions the species encounters in the wild, and that includes changing certain variables in the environment from time to time.
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