some advice from the gecko guru's....

[Trinigecko]

hello everyone! this is a awesome website, chock full of info. well i recently bought a juvenile leopard gecko at a reptile show. i had it for about 2 months already and i can see the growth in it! it seems to be in excellent health and it eats like there is no tomorrow! my question is, i presently have it in a 10 gallon tank. i just finished breaking down my reef tank which was a 40 gallon long and now is set up for my leopard gecko. i would like to keep a total of 3 geckos in the 40 gallon long. i read that many say its best to work with one first and then take it from there but i see these lil guys as a loooooong term investment and would like to keep 3 or 2. i have numerous caves on the hot, cool and in between side, as well as a few tupperware containers as moisture dens. the hot side is 90 and the cool is about 75. i would like to get the geckos at all the same size and as juveniles so they shall be familiar with each other. should i go with 3 females of different morphs or 1 male and 2 females(luck guy....lol) or 1 male and 1 female or 2 females....i'm not really interested in breeding them but if they did i will gladly donate them. or is it possible to keep the temp. and light cycle uniform thru out the year so it will not stimulate them to breed?( i heard it's the change in temp. as well as the light cycle that triggers their breeding) thanks for the input!

 

[Sunrise Reptile]

If you put a male in there with one or two females, they're going to breed. There's nothing you can do to keep them from breeding so long as they're housed in the same enclosure.

What I would suggest is another female or two. That way, you achieve your goal of more than one gecko in the enclosure, and you don't have to worry about any mating activity until maybe someday when you figure you'd like to venture into it.

Just be sure that, any additional geckos you pick up with the intent of introducing into the same enclosure, are put through a quarantine period when you first purchase them and bring them home. You don't want to introduce any unknown illness to the gecko you already have in there.

 

[mango+cola]

Just to expand a bit, you should quarantine any new geckos for 3 months, then any potential health problems that it has will show. Then if you see nothing, introduce them first, they may not even like each other. Even if they are all female doesn't mean they will get along, if they don't like each other they can fight and bully each other. And this isn't just physically, one can hog all of the mealworms and make the other starve. I am actually in the process of introducing my 2 females to each other now to see if they will happily live together. However this won't happen for another few months because don't forget they have to be roughly the same size to live together, and one of them is still growing