Reptile Talk

Assembly is easy, but sealant is definitely a thing.

So basically, if you go by AP instructions, you assemble the whole cage, but don’t fasten the top too well. Top is one of the first ones to have to be fastened by screws, so you have to back up and remove it before you seal.

If you are geometrically talented, you can change the order of assembly it such that the top (not to brag, but after a cage or two, we figured out how to avoid the extra steps – we have five AP cages total, all bought new and assembled by us).

Then you get messy with the sealant. They provide an excellent sealant, and if you have thin silicone or nitrile gloves, use them. I used my bare hands, with lots of water to keep the sealant from sticking to my skin.

Should have taken how-to photos, in retrospect, but here’s how you do it.

1. Lay out a bead of sealant along the seam that you’d like to waterproof.2. Moisten your finger or thumb generously with water (I had a sprayer handy for that) and drag it along the seam, pushing the sealant in as much as you can, and leaving it as smooth as you can.3. If you want to add more, or to smooth out, just spray down with water and repeat.4. If you mess up and smear the sealant onto something it shouldn’t be on (like I did with Slinky’s acrylic door!), Goo-gone removes it while it’s still fresh.

The sealant cures in 24 hours if you’re lucky. It uses air moisture to cure, so we used fine mist sprayer to accelerate curing. We still waited 3 days to move the snakes in, because you could still smell it after 24 hours.

We sealed along the bottom, and about 2 inches up along the walls. We did not seal the top, since if the water is up to above 2 inches inside the cage, we have bigger problems.

Enrichment is an important part of reptile husbandry, and it can be a real challenge for some species. For active snakes like colubrids, it can be done by adding new things into the environment, but sand boas spend most of their time underground. They’re not climbers, they’re burrowers. What can you do to make their lives more interesting? There are a number of things, including burying items in their substrate to tunnel around, introducing the shed skin of other reptiles for them to investigate, and making feeding time more of a puzzle. For my sand boa’s birthday, I made a simple feeding puzzle. I hid his pinkie under a little box and then stepped back with the camera, waiting to see what would happen.

He knew there was a pinkie somewhere. But where?

After several minutes of noodling around, he tried to investigate the box more thoroughly… by attempting to burrow under it. This was when I realized there was going to be a problem, because I’d put the pinkie on a piece of towel under the box so that it wouldn’t get covered in aspen. So as he noodled under the box, I removed the top.

It… still took him a while to realize that the pinkie was now visible. 

But eventually he figured it out… and ate it in the most dramatic way possible! 

Later on, he dropped the pinkie, somehow backed into a burrow, and then just stared at me, completely helpless. I had to give him an assist with the tongs.

How on earth did he back into a burrow? As far as I knew, he always tunneled in face first.

See what I mean? Completely helpless.

But eventually he figured it out. Sorta.

You’re causing this animal to stress out, it’s probably loaded with parasites, and parasites get worse when stress increases. Perhaps leading to an even worse and faster death. Hell, it may even spread to your other animals in some way.

In my mind I hadn’t thought the law would go “NOPE”. Most of the time with releases we’re thinking along the lines of “Don’t toss your ball pythons into the everglades” because they came from a different part of the world and don’t have natural predators, leading to the problem the law tries to address.

You’re causing this animal to stress out, it’s probably loaded with parasites, and parasites get worse when stress increases. Perhaps leading to an even worse and faster death. Hell, it may even spread to your other animals in some way.

Apples are not okay for crested geckos to have, to start. 

For another, housing two hatchlings in a single enclosure can cause them to fight. Resulting in wounds, broken limbs, lost tails and even illness. 

Third, a dirt substrate for hatchlings that looks to be unsifted to boot, is dangerous. These babies will snap at anything that so much as twitches, leading to ingestion of the soil and those twigs/mulch that’s mixed in- it can easily kill them. 

As an added thought, since they’re so young I’m pretty sure you recently purchased them, and they should both be quarantined away from each other for 30 days at the least, or 60 at the most, and on paper towels in a kritter keeper to monitor eating/pooping habits.

I also forgot to mention, at this size you have no idea if they’re male or female yet, so you may be housing a male/female pair that are not of breeding weight. A f/m pair would breed and breed and breed, stressing out the female so she retains eggs (eggbinding) or in this case- cannot pass them at all due to her size. 

A m/m or f/f pair would fight over resources like food, water and hides. Sometimes resulting in death, as the second link provided explains.

Substrate is the stuff on the bottom of the tank, I’d recommend removing them from this enclosure and putting them into separate large size kritter keepers with paper towels, as they’ll go right under it if it’s just thrown atop the soil. 

On sexing them: “ The males develop a rather prominent hemipenile bulge just behind their vent. This bulge may begin developing at around 5 months, but often it may take longer to be visible.” My geckos are more than double that age. They haven’t developed any bulge, so I’m quite certain they’re female. 

Which leads to my next thing: multiple females can in fact be housed together. They have been eating normally, and usually don’t even bother with each other. 

 Unless you have a macro image of pre-anal pores, you don’t know.

I still wouldn’t give my cresties apple as it is one of the least nutritious fruits to give them, also you tossed a whole apple core in there. People usually mush up the fruit so it’s soft. Take it out before it molds.

Multiple females can be housed together, but it is not recommended. Hence the “why did I find my female dead with her eyes eaten” post among numerous others.