Sand Colour Matters

Over the holidays I was a very busy lady with very little time to snap pictures of our reptilian children, so you'll just have to take my word for it when I tell you that sand colour impacts a baby lizards skin colours.  Over the holidays our set-up for the leos was 3 tanks:  A nursery tank with orange/red lizard carpet for the hatchlings, a junior tank with black sand for the babies that were too big for the nursery tank but still too small for the adult tank, and the adult tank with orange/red sand.  At the beginning of December sometime we moved two of the babies, Charlie and Foxtrot, into the junior tank with the black sand, and within a week their colours had darkened considerably.  After a few weeks, they were both dark grey with black spots and very little distinguishable orange like they'd had while they were in the nursery tank. 

Then we decided that we'd just throw caution to the wind and put them in the adult tank, as they were growing fast at this point and weren't much smaller than the others had been when they were transitioned to the big tank.  Within a day of moving them to the big tank their colours brightened considerably to the point where Foxtrot now has some of the most vivid markings out of all the geckos. 

I only have an "after" picture of Foxtrot, but imagine that not two days before this picture was taken she was dark grey and black with really no other colour at all:

And speaking of colours coming out, Darwin's colours are beginning to brighten quite a bit too.  He's around 9 or 10 months old now and he's turning from his beiges and browns into his adult colours which are going to be bright oranges and reds.

Anyway, he's brumating right now so he's a little boring lately.  He just lays around like a couch-potato with little to no interest in crickets or anything else.  Lazy little bugger, ha ha.  I triggered his brumation when I changed power-bars to his light supply and the timer didn't work properly, so he ended up with way more dark time than normal.  I'm going to give him some time to do his thing, all the while decreasing his daylight a little more every day, and then I'm going to experiment with the idea that maybe I can trigger him to come out of brumation by slowly increasing his daylight every day.  Maybe... I need to do some more reading and whatnot before I try it.

Well, that's it for now.

Still no sign of Rex.

~J