Hey there! New poster and recent recipient of Steve, the bearded dragon. After a lot of research, many trips back and forth to the pet store, three receipts full of returns, one accidental cricket spilling, and a long adventure through home depot I finally have everything I need for his cage, although it looks rather barren right now (I'll get more as money comes in, but the initial investment was enough to drain me dry for now, unfortunately). So my basic setup is in a Zilla 40 gallon 'critter cage', which is 18 wide, 36 long, and 16 tall. Currently inside on one side he has a bowl full of bearded dragon pellet food and freeze-dried meal worms (which he avoids like the plague in favor of live crickets) and a bowl of water that isn't deep enough for him to swim in. On the other side of the cage is a large hollow turtle shell that both lets him get closer to the basking light (affixed directly above it) and also hide in, though he never seems to want to do that. He's eating healthily; I noticed one or two meal worms toppled from the container I put them in and half-eaten and every time I see that all the crickets in the cage are gone I put 3-4 more in (every other feeding I coat them in calcium) and I handle him for ten minutes a day, though being so tiny I can't do much with him for fear of hurting him... but he usually just sits there on my fingers. Above the cage I have a 150 watt basking light that sits on the cage, a long tubular uvb light, two thermometers with probes that dip down into the cage, and a ceramic heating bulb. I started with just the light, but let me explain, since this is the problem: I put the thermometers on either side of the cage, they have little suction cups so I put them on the sides of the glass about an inch above the substrade (which is non-adhesive shelf liner, since I was told loose substrates are bad for them and I couldn't find reptile carpet that was wide enough and when I makeshifted it into a shape crickets hid underneath it). The temperature on the side of the cage on the hot end stood at the high-eightees-degrees, and I was worried it wasn't getting hot enough... so I got the ceramic bulb and now it goes to 92-94 degrees... but recently as a test I put the probe of the thermometer on the turtle shell where he spends most of his time and found the temperature climbing up in the 130's! I don't know if somehow setting it on the solid surface rather than suspending it in the air had an affect or if that's just REALLY hot, but I mist the other wise of the cage to keep it moist and cool, he just never seems to want to leave that shell... if they thermoregulate does that mean that this temperature is fine? I'm trying to deduce which temperature to go with. Thanks for surviving my wall-of-text! Jake
Welcome to the forums, Jake! I'll address your concern about the temperatures and placement of probes momentarily. First, just as a precaution, I'd like to ask just a couple of questions. What is the specific brand of UVB producing bulb you have and how close can Steve get to the bulb(s)? What supplements are you using and at what frequency? I'm going to link you to our bearded dragon article database and a wesbite that lists TONS of nutritional information and explanation about what to feed as a staple items and what to feed rarely or never at all. This is icredibly useful when shopping for salad items. I'd actually recommend you only feed the crickets at this point - mealworms (especially the freeze dried one's) are fairly poor feeders with a low nutrional content and are mostly shell. Beardies are more prone to impaction than other species and eating too many mealworms can actually cause problems down the road for some. Bearded Dragon Database Nutritional Content - BeautifulDragons.com You will also find the highlighted "Stickied" Topics at the top of this Bearded Dragon forum helpful as well with your continuing research. Now that thats out of the way (I assure you, we like to cover the bases and give additional quality ltierature to ALL of our members, lol) we can address your specific problems = ) YOUR QUESTIONS: There are three areas of concern when looking at temperatures within the bearded dargon's enclosure: The Basking Spot, The Warm end, and the Cool end of the viv. The most important is the Basking Spot - This is where the dragon will be spending a good portion of his time and he will need this spot to be of appropriate temperature to digest and function properly. The Basking Spot should be ~105 degrees F. Adult beardies with more mass can handle down into the 100 range while juveniles can take things a little warmer closer to 110 (even 115) but ideally somewhere around 105 is a good range to shoot for for all ages. Once you have the basking spot right, the other areas generally follow suit - its usually recommended to have the general warm end around the basking spot to be ~90 degrees and the cool end roughly room temp to 80 degrees. Now, don't stress yourself out trying to get things spot on with these areas. The Basking Spot is the most important spot to have correct - and in general the side of the cage with the lights over it gets warm enough to be comfortable. And yes, you absolutely want to measure Surface Temperature. The surface temperature of the basking spot should be 100-110 degrees F. Beardie's spend a TON of time basking... many will rarely leave their basking post throughout the day unless they are hunting for food or just feeling ambitious/too hot. They are fairly lazy animals... you will usually find them trying to tolerate the heat by gaping their mouth if they get too hot (this is how they cool themselves, much like dogs panting or how we sweat) rather than actually moving to a cooler location. And no worries about long posts here - the more information the better in my book. As you can see, I'm a fan of long posts myself = )
Thanks Jeff! It's actually funny that you address those issues since in the meantime while waiting for a response I've been looking at my UVB bulb (I was wandering across the site and made it to here: http://www.uvguide.co.uk/whatreptilesneed.htm ) and apparently I'm going to have to run to petco today and get another: it's the Zilla slimline desert fixture with the desert 50 bulb in it, which is apparently quite dangerous to start with. Also, apparently, fluorescent bulbs are only good out to six inches, whereas mine is sitting atop my 16 inch cage with wire mesh betwixt it and Steve. Also, I work at Kroger... so when I learned they ate veggies I picked some up. He's got some chopped up turnip greens, collard greens, and about 1/4 chopped strawberry in there that I replace daily (well... not the strawberry, I was under the impression that fruits in general were supposed to be a very rare thing). I'll get rid of the meal worms then, since he doesn't seem terribly interested in them and prefers the crickets on top of their low nutritional value.I'm using 'Fluker's Calcium with vitamin D3 (phosphorous free).' The nutritional value informs me that it contains calcium - Not less than 36.00% and Vitamin D3 minimum - 100,000 IU/lb. I also have Rep-Cal Herptivite with beta carotene multivitamins, but I have yet to use those. Looking at the cage it seems he's found two crickets since my first post. =) Noted about his basking temperature: I was wondering how other people were using a single bulb to get their basking spot to the appropriate temperature and here I had a ceramic bulbn and a 150w basking bulb and still couldn't get it there... now I'm glad I didn't! Thanks again so much for your help, I'm working on getting the basking temperature right with just the basking bulb for now, but now I've got a new problem in the form of knowing very little about UVB bulbs. Ideally since I'm already using a uva basking bulb that gives off quite a bit of heat I would go get a fluorescent UVB bulb, but I don't think that's practical if they're so short-range and blocked so significantly by wire mesh... I'm going to browse around a bit, but do you have any thoughts?
Glad to help! = ) You may find this useful, one of out members made this nice little document on UVB lighting and good brands: http://www.reptileboards.com/threads/uvb-basics.64396/ I tend to prefer Mercury Vapor Bulbs (MVB's) because they only need replaced yearly and produce both heat and high outputs of UVB at greater distances, but the majority of keepers opt to use a basking light and a flourescent UVB producing bulb. My favorite brand of UVB producing flo bulb is the Repti-Sun 10.0 by ZooMed, if that helps. But there are other brands that are decent. Here is another guide to UVB producing bulbs, there was a UVB test performed by Beautifuldragons.com and our site's founder, Cheri Smith. Our Beardie database I linked to earlier has a UVB article in it, but here is another link for bulb comparisons: http://www.beautifuldragons.com/Researchmain.html Your supplements sound excellent - I'm very fond of Rep-Cal products. Their pellets for beardie's are the best in the market IMO and the supplements (such as your Herptivite) are some of the best as well. Your Cal+D3 sounds good too, though you may want to consider picking up a Calcium supplement with no D3 if you opt to go with an MVB due to the higher output of UVB (we can discuss this more later, not that big of a deal right now). Also - to save you some cash in the future. Standard basking bulbs for heat only can simply be household incandescent bulbs that may only cost $1 or so at Home Depot or other stores. The basking bulbs at pet stores that do not produce UVB are basically a rip off - they just package up large vapor bulbs, halogens, etc and throw their company logo on them to resell for triple the price ; ) I do want to add one important detail question: Are these thermometers digital? The stick on analog ones from pet stores can be incredibly inaccurate - make sure you are measuring temps with a tempgun or digital thermometer with a probe (you can pick one up from Walmart for around $10 or less).
I've been researching while waiting for a response and am actually heavily considering a MVB now because it looks like my 150 watt basking bulb is actually raising the temperature of his basking spot much higher than it needs to be... so now I'm going to go to petsmart and hope that they'll refund this bulb and the uvb kit without a receipt.... AND this ceramic heating unit, since it's also obsolete now... I actually started off buying everything I'd need for an iguana... then did some research and found out that iguanas are NOT beginner reptile rearers' friends. So I've been back and forth returning and buying everything. They're going to hate me XD Regarding basking bulbs, really? I just googled UVA light and found out that standard lightbulbs give it out... they plaster it on the front like UVA rays are something special. Combined with the harmful UVB kit I've bought, the general lack of knowledge on pamphlets about pets, and the awful prices on the simplest items ($35 for a bit of driftwood twice the size of my hand!) I'm starting to trust the pet industry less and less. I already found out that the ceramic clamp lamps at pet stores charge double what home depot charges for the same thing in a wider variety of styles and sizes. I'm gonna do a little bit more research and then head off to return some things. Ugh.
