The New Neighbor Downstairs

Our two adult leopard geckos are named Rex and Buddy. Rex (above) is a male Hypo-Tangerine, and Buddy is a female Leucistic. The reason Buddy seems to have such a masculine name is simply because she was our very first lizard and we thought she was a he when we first brought her home. By the time we realized that she was female, the name was stuck.

Rex and Buddy live in a terrarrium on the top shelf of a unit that up until this week had no bottom neighbor. We just used the bottom shelf to hold all their "stuff", like crickets, mealworms, spray bottle, etc. When we brought Darwin home and set him up on the bottom shelf we quickly realized that the geckos no longer need their heat lamps because the sun lamps below their tank keep the sand directly above at a toasty 85-90 degrees. So... we spent close to $70 on lighting for Darwin, only to end up having extra lighting available because the geckos no longer need it. Go figure.

At first I thought that maybe we should return the $70 worth of lighting, but we've come to realize that once Rex and Buddy's babies are all hatched and ready, some of them are going to be moving into their parents' tank (or, rather, their mother's tank as Rex will be going to live with our friend Rob once the babies are ready to be integrated... John and I both take issue with letting the daddy breed with his daughters. It's not a big deal in the lizard world, but it creeps us out). At that point we might just put Darwin on top, and the geckos below and then we'll need those extra lights again. Also, you just never know when extra lighting will come in handy. Our first two baby geckos hatched just over a month ago, but we lost the second two eggs to mould. The next ones aren't due to hatch for another month or so and by then, Alpha* and Beta* might be too big to have in the same tank with the little ones.

*We're holding off on officially naming the babies because we aren't keeping all of them. We will keep the first two or three females and the rest will go to breeders and friends, but we wont know which ones are males and females for a awhile yet. The first female we keep will be Godzilla, because we promised Talon :D.