On Sunday, we went to a reptile show down in White Plains. Now this was much more worth it! Lots and lots of cool reptiles, including chameleons, all kinds of geckos, snakes, lots of other things. We picked up a little baby leopard gecko. I’ve named him Picante.
On Sunday night we tried feeding him live mealworms but he was completely uninterested and didn’t eat all day Monday as far as we could tell. On Monday night, we tried pinhead crickets and that was it! He gobbled up nine of them and looked around for more.
He’s very friendly and has no problem with being held. Here are some pics. The read-only password is Mellon, case-sensitive, then you have to click on Picante.
We have lizards (we call them geckoes, although that’s probably inaccurate) all over our side walk, screened porch, walls of our house. You can have some for free if you ever come down.
He’s so cute! Does he have the little round toes? I love the little round toes.
Did you “shake ‘n’ bake” the crickets with that calcium (?) powder? I used to love doing that for my friend’s geckos. It looks a bit odd though, white crickets jumping around…
Exactly. And yet the guy at the show said he’d been eating both. But I felt like he was offended.
“Mealworms! What is this crap?”
It is really cool to see him stalk and hunt, though. He watches them, and then right before he pounces his tail sticks straight up and then wags briefly, almost like a rattlesnake shaking its rattles. Then POUNCE! And there’s one less cricket.
Ok, looked it up and what we have here seem to be mostly anoles. But the picture I found of a Jesus Lizard was the most interesting, them being 2 feet long and able to walk on water (I think they’re actually brown basilisks, an equally cool name). Sadly they’re non-native and probably bad for the environment but I would mind seeing one strolling across the water sometime.
Whynot, he has three tiny little toes on each foot. They are not so round but they are not much thicker than a hair. His toes are a pale yellow, and the pads on his feet are a little sticky. He’s very animated and bright-eyed, and seems to examine most things and look around. We had to remove the fake cork background from the tank as the first thing he did is get himself stuck behind it, and we had to gently pry him out so as not to hurt his tail.
His tail is nice and fat, as is supposed to be. We don’t dust the crickets, they say for leopards you can just leave the calcium in another dish and he will actually get it himself when he needs it.
The crickets are being fed orange cubes of fairly decent-smelling stuff, it gives them a good gut-load so when they go in his belly he gets lots of vitamins and nutrients.
And the crickets are of course rock-stupid…they walk right in front of him or over his foot, making him twitch.
The cubes are good. I’ve used them and they keep the crickets fed & watered well.
It’s weird but the crickets seem to know whether my anoles are hungry or not. If they are, the crickets will hide immediately upon being placed in the terrarium. If not, they’ll just go about their crickety business. More than once I’ve turned on the light in the morning to see a cricket sleeping on top of a sleeping anole’s head. Once one of my lizards was actually sleeping with his arm around a sleeping cricket…that was so cute. I wish I’d had my camera!
Can I ask you about your setup? I’m looking at a few different possibilities for an empty tank I have kicking around since I upgraded my Firebelly Toads to a new home and the Leopard Gecko is on the list of possibilities.
Yay lizard! Everyone I know that’s had a lizard has derived nothing but fun and enjoyment from it. They’re just such fascinating creatures, and not at all impersonable, as you’ve found. Cute and bubbly, I believe, is the correct expression. Surprisingly warm-blooded of them, wouldn’t you say?
Anyway, your lizard looks great. Have fun playing with him!
Oh sure. I have an Exo-Terra tank. I’ll try to find a linky in a moment. Anyway, these tanks are cool in that they have screen tops but also front opening doors.
At the moment he is yet a baby so we have opted for soft paper towels instead of the stones and pellets we will add as an adult, since his feet can be easily caught in the stone.
We have a small cave for him to hide. We also have three small bowls - one for calcium, one for crickets/mealworms (not that the little bastards stay in there) and one for water.
We also have [in there.
Eventually we plan to put down a pellet mixture on the bottom, which they say is better for them then sand, since the geckos will sometimes eat the sand and then get sick. We couldn’t find this in any local pet stores, so had to order it, although we got some more at the reptile show.
Eventually we plan to fill the backing with sphanghum (spelling?) moss and put a large piece of [url=Welcome! You have discovered Black Jungle Exotics - The Natural Choice!!]cholla wood](http://mgonline.com/airplantsintroduction.htmlair plants[/url) in there. We aren’t going to do that until he’s big enough to put rocks, etc., because the cholla wood will fill up with crickets and then make it difficult to remove. We will add plenty more air plants and we may even put the foam backing back in, once he’s too big to squeeze between it and the glass, (which was almost the first thing he did.)
We are planning to purchase chunks of shale from Home Depot and break them apart to put them in and provide some more decoration, and then we will add more air plants in there, too. He’s a desert guy, so the terrarium will be very arid and the only green will be the air plants.
Oh, duh. Yes, right now we have a special 100 watt heat lamp. And a thermometer and a humidity checker-thingy. We haven’t needed the heat lamp yet as that room runs around 85 degrees and 60 % humidity or so. We do use the lamp when we turn the AC on in that room.
We plan to get a timer eventually for the lamp, as winters up here are very cold. The one we have in mind is thermostat-sensitive, meaning it turns on only when the tank drops below a certain temp.
We also have a heating pad that is designed to go on the bottom of the tank, however we haven’t put that in yet because we haven’t put the clay pellets on the bottom. That’s also reserved for when he gets a little older.
So sorry. Lighting and heat is really important, isn’t it?
