biohazard boys

*in most** cases

**sometimes you need to peel the lizard but this is not one of those times

Sometimes a lizard will need help peeling. Like my tegu, I take her toes off for her if she doesn't take them off herself. But it doesn't look like this- I'll grab shed that's completely lifted off that she just hasn't gotten rid of. Sometimes when her nose is peeling, she'll come find me and rub against some surface- usually my shoe- to get the shed off. But she knows when the shed needs to come off; I don't pull it off. Generally if you pet your lizard gently and the shed comes off, that's fine. But!

This is a leopard gecko, and you really shouldn't be helping them with their shed like this. Leopard geckos (and many other geckos) have teensy tiny scales that are easily damaged by pulling on the skin. You're far more likely to hurt them than help them, especially where the skin doesn't lift off at the nose and around the mouth. You can also really damage their eyes by pulling on the eyelids, and if you're helping a gecko without eyelids, you can damage the scale that covers the eye. Inflating the shed like this forces air under the shed layer, which can lift it prematurely and damage the scales underneath.

Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- there’s still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.

Until Kraken, social enrichment wasn’t a thing people thought about. It wasn’t something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were just… lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasn’t until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.

Kraken’s not in that video, but she’s the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepers  started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoples’ pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.

She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity that’s voluntary, repeated, and conducted under “relatively benign” circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. “Kraken,” they wrote, had clearly demonstrated “play-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).” Moreover, she “could discriminate between prey and nonprey” while showing “varying responses” with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (There’s an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)