So my daughter wanted a goddamned snake. I managed to negotiate it down to a leopard gecko, allegedly the easiest reptile to keep.
I admit I like Spottie. She’s a delightful little creature; cute, pleasant, and handle-able. She doesn’t make noise and doesn’t smell. She’s pretty. You can’t complain about those things. But I’ll tell you this:
Feeding a gecko is disgusting. I have to feed it CRICKETS, which are horrible, horrible bugs. And you can’t just toss crickets in there, nooo. You have to dust them, like Shake n Bake, I swear to God, with this calcium/vitamin supplement. and that’s after you feed them cricket chow (I swear, they sell cricket food, without a hint of shame) and vegetables. The fucking crickets eat better than I do. It’s vile. I actually have a box of crickets in my house (which I put into another box, which was then put into ANOTHER box, because ew) to feed to my pet. Why you can’t train these things to eat decent food like Big Macs, I don’t know. When the beast finally ate a couple of crickets - she was off her feed the first few days - I enjoyed watching them die. I hope they suffered.
Apparently you an also feed it larva and stuff. Ew. Fortunately such things don’t jump around and present an escape hazard. Unfortunately they are allegedly nutritionally inferior.
You cannot really get a straight answer as to how to care for a reptile. The place I bought it from - staffed by people who clearly know their shit, and who kept this particular lizard for five years - advised me to set the tank up with non-calcite sand and overhead heat. The internet, however, is full of people who state that I am a reptile murderer to do either amd that I must use a heat mat and a flat surface. Some people advise a hiding place with a bit of moisture in it, and some tell me it’s humid enough here. (Even on a normal day the humidity is 40-45 in my condo.) Some people say you should “mist” the gecko and some people say that is madness. Some people say the enclosure must be heated at night and others say that is nonsense. I went back to the reptile place and they said “just keep her the same way we did. It kept her alive and happy for five years, didn’t it?” Well yeah, but what if they got lucky? Ahhhhh!
I’m gonna do everything the pet store said and hope for the best.
Did you know these things can live 20 years? Holy shit, what have I gotten myself in to?
Honestly, the snake would have been easier :). The most commonly kept types are probably the easiest pets you can find. Yeah, dead mice are pretty disgusting in of themselves, but a pack of frozen mice in the fridge beats a box of live crickets in the study. I hated dealing with crickets. Give me snakes over lizards any day.
But otherwise, it was a solid compromise. Congrats on your…err…your daughter’s new pet. Wish I could give some better care instructions( I kept some superficially very similar African Fat-Tailed Geckos at one point ), but it has been quite awhile and I’d be just one more internet voice among thousands. You might try one of the better guide books.
Very cute. I sort of like the spots. Just wait until the personality emerges
I would have gone with an iguana myself. I had a green iguana named Pop for a few years until it picked up a tumor and had to be put down.
Iggy was vegan - very easy to feed once I got the hang of it. They even develop little lizardy personalities. They also get food likes and dislikes. Mine hated escarole and adored shredded carrot.
The geckos that live around the outside of my house (and help keep me largely roach free) sound like they are saying “geck!o! geck!o!” sometimes. Very cool animals.
We had a Madagascar Day gecko when I was a kid. I liked that guy/gal! (We went on a vacation and we are pretty sure that when we came back and got it from the pet store who took care of it for us while we were away, we had a male gecko in place of a female, but weren’t sure enough to say anything)
Spottie, who’s doing well, shed for the first time (with us) today.
I have to admit it was kind of amazing. You never saw it coming. She looked the same yesterday and she did before. Today we went to get her some silkworms as a treat. GEtting home, I walked in to feed her and she’s out in midday (unusual) and pale (scary unusual.) The Small One, whose school has geckos, says “Oh, she’s shedding!”
Sure enough, she was. I pulled a little off the head; it was like dried white glue, so thin and fragile, and exposed absolutely perfect skin underneath. She hated that and didn’t want me peeling, and did it her, eating the skin as she went (ew.) She was pulling it off her legs the way you’d pull off a shirt or a pair of pants, like it was no big deal at all. I got a few peices fr the Small One to save, and within an hour she was done and looked absolutely perfect. What a neat thing.
My daughter wanted a snake and got negotiated down to a leopard gecko too! But thankfully, she’s 12 1/2 and can do most of the upkeep herself. Sandman’s aquarium is lined with paper towels. He gets crickets when we get around to getting them, but his main meal is live mealworms, which creeps me out and saddens me slightly, but I don’t deal with them. I don’t like keeping them in the fridge either, but such is life.
He has shed his skin a couple times. I think he’s cool to look at and stuff, but I don’t appreciate his insect-gobbling, skin-gobbling ways. I would not have gotten the little bastard–we already have a guinea pig–but my mom got it for her.
Huh. I am Bitey the Chinese Water Dragon’s caretaker due to a similar set of circumstances i.e. daughter wanted a snake. Bitey also feeds on crickets and such. I get some amusement, and perhaps you will too, out of following my daughter’s lead and referring to them as “villagers” rather than crickets.
Some garter type snakes eat goldfish. It’s really cool to drop on in a water dish and watch them hunt. You can decorate the cage with a building from a model train set. That way she’ll look like Godzilla.
Seriously? I’ve never dealt with a leopard gecko (some kind of day gecko, though), and snakes are waaaaay easier to care for. I know it’s been some months, but I recommend you handle the hell out of it. If you don’t they get skittish, and will try to escape. And snakes are slow, geckos are fast and can climb your walls. My dad’s taking care of it, but I think he has bark on the bottom, overhead lamp and a heat rock. Although every time I see leopards, it seems they have sand. I wouldn’t trust the 16-year old pet shop employee’s opinions, but then internet people might be worse.
I also never thought RickJay would be so skittish about insects. Crickets suck, but not for the reasons you state. They will escape, and you’ll hear the infernal creaking all the time. If you have cats, they will get some entertainment.
I’ll get a bearded dragon one of these days, I swear!
I feed the villagers this stuff. I tried feeding them vegetables and fruit, but the vegetables would get moldy or dry out in short order and the villagers would starve. The villagers, who aren’t very smart or perhaps they were succumbing to despair, drowned themselves in large numbers in their water dish. This orange stuff supplies all their needs. All I have to do is drop a cube or two in the village square.
Yesterday, the village elder (the biggest cricket) was selected as sacrifice to the great dragon. She devoured him and then posed on her basking log with one of his jumping legs still dangling from the corner of her mouth.
I care for Bitey most of the time, as my daughter is with me only on alternate week-ends, but thinking of it as a fantasy drama makes it less of a drag than thinking of it as having to feed that effing lizard some of those disgusting bugs.
I had a leopard gecko for ten years. I fed him mealworms, dusted with powder, and waxworms for a treat. I never gave him crickets, I hated those fuckers. I handfed him so he was pretty spoiled rotten.
I had a heat lamp for him as well as a floor heater. It gets cold in Albany.
I handled him a lot, almost daily. He was very lazy and never minded at all.
He liked misting but never on his head, he’d skulk away from that.
Here is a poem I wrote on him after he died:
My gecko is a liquid pool of sloth.
He oozes over his rocks.
He slips through my hands.
He pours himself into his cave,
like a ribbon of gold-flecked water,
winding his way through his tank.
Will he evaporate in the sun?
I miss him lots. They make a hole in your heart, as someone said on these very boards?
Leopard geckos cannot climb walls. They are one of the Eublepharines, a group that lacks the fancy-shmancy foot adaptations that allows other geckos to scamper about on smooth vertical surfaces like Spiderman.
They make a hole in your heart, as someone said on these very boards?