how many geckos per floor space?

[SC Geckos]

No matter what you do to a 10 gallon, it won't fix the temp issue. A heat may alone is not enough heat in the winter or a room under 75f.

I think its easier to create the proper heat gradient in a smaller enclosure. (using a UTH w/thermostat). However if you use heat lamps as a heat source in a small enclosure I can see how it would be more difficult.

 

[Embrace Calamity]

True but those are not what most breeders that CARE about and love their leos do. Your talking about wannabees that only breed leos to make a quick buck and really dont care if they put a bad rep on breeders that do it cause we just enjoy the animals and want more of them or like the scientific aspects of it.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just making the point you can't really use "that's what breeders do" as a support for how geckos (or any other animal) should be treated. Now if you said, "That's what such and such wellknown and highly respected breeder does," then it'd be different. Just playing devil's advocate, I suppose, as I think both sides make good points (but am still not fond of the idea of keeping an adult in a 10 gallon).

~Maggot

 

[Russellm0704]

I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just making the point you can't really use "that's what breeders do" as a support for how geckos (or any other animal) should be treated. Now if you said, "That's what such and such wellknown and highly respected breeder does," then it'd be different. Just playing devil's advocate, I suppose, as I think both sides make good points (but am still not fond of the idea of keeping an adult in a 10 gallon).

~Maggot

Well I should have been more specific. I forgot that you are fairly new to the forum(or at least I'm guessing) so you may not know the quality of the breeders that are members here. If you watch all of their YouTube videos it is obvious that their care is top notch. And yes many geckos do feel more secure in smaller enclosures.

 

[M_surinamensis]

And yes many geckos do feel more secure in smaller enclosures.

Old posts, quoting as a time saver.

It really comes down to microhabitat, behavioral needs and environmental control.

Microhabitat is a term that is used to indicate the extremely specific conditions and areas where an animal lives. Habitat is a region or country and broad terrain type... like "Afghan Desert." Microhabitat includes more detailed information like "rocky areas with heavy ground cover to hide from predators and escape the mid-day heat, including some enclosed areas with pockets of higher moisture." It is specific temperatures, humidities and light intensities, it is detailed information about ground cover, hides, holes and basking areas; it is information about what an animal needs and what it avoids.

Microhabitat ties in to the behavioral needs because the animal in question is responding to instinctive dictates which pressure it to look for the ideal microhabitat. The exact second to second needs of the animal change, which is why they will move from a warm hide to a cool one, to a moist hide or out in the open- but those behaviors are all a result of instinctive dictates. Sometimes instincts can conflict with themselves or over-ride one another. The instincts are pressuring the animal to find someplace warm and humid, but the only options are warm and dry or cool and humid and one need will win out. One of the instincts that tends to be quite powerful, especially in small, terrestrial, crepuscular geckos is the need to hide, it can overwhelm almost anything else.

Environmental control is something we are responsible for with captive animals. Supplying appropriately sized hides, a temperature gradient, the proper light intensity and so on. What we provide, the conditions we manufacture, dictate what kind of microhabitat is available for our animals and consequentially what kind of behaviors they display. If we build an environment incorrectly based on the conditions which are ideal for the animal, we can retard certain instincts and behaviors and harm the animal as a result.

Larger environments are not inherently bad... the animals have no problem finding water or food (that's just ridiculous to even suggest)- the problems of a larger environment are often something created by the person who is putting it together as they change the microhabitat. In the exact same way that people often have difficulty maintaining an ideal thermal gradient in a very small enclosure with the tools that are readily available to them, they frequently have problems doing the same in a large one. It is easy to fill a twenty gallon tank with hides and cover to make a leo feel secure- but people often fail to have the same density of cover when they go to a bigger enclosure (feeling some obscure need to leave wide open spaces of nothing). The taller, longer environment gets away from them as they regard either end as an extreme and do not bother measuring conditions across the entire length at even intervals, the height provides a lot of open space which they rarely fill, they sometimes switch to brighter lights...

Essentially, it is not that big environments are bad, it is that they mandate some additional care that owners often seem to skip. Four hides in a twenty long is fine, four hides in a forty breeder is not. Two thermometers in a twenty long is perfect, two thermometers in a fifty five is not. If the effort is made to replicate the ideal microhabitat, there's nothing at all wrong with a big enclosure. It just needs to be big and controlled.

Appropriately sized and positioned hides make an animal feel secure, their instincts dictate that they remain near to a place where they can be safe from (most) predators. Part of it is the visual barrier, in or down or under or behind... and part of it involves the way that the space is just big enough for the animal and too small for most things that would eat them.

The various glass and plastic boxes we tend to keep them in are restrictive. They have X cubic feet of space from which they cannot escape. Reptiles aren't real... good... at understanding glass, but they are on some perceptual level aware of the fact that they're in a space that restricts them. The enclosure is usually too big to function as a hide, based on the total internal dimensions. Unless we then fill that space appropriately, the animals can be stressed out by conditions which amount to being trapped in a space that is too big to function as a hide and too small to allow for escape.

Big enclosures are perfectly fine, if some forethought goes into how the space is used in relation to the microhabitat that's ideal for the animal.