Surviving Crypto

[geckomantherealest]

I have lost a few animals due to crypto. My current animals are testing negative but I worry about stopping the spread for good since I know crypto is hard to detect consistently. Has anyone experienced a crypto outbreak and recovered from it? If so how long did it take before you stopped seeing it pop back up? I detected the first animal shortly after it came in about 1 year ago. I lost one animal that fall and put down another one at the same time that was right next to it and tested positive. It's been about 6 months since I've found a positive animal but I am still dreadfully worried.

 

[acpart]

My entire colony got crypto 9 years ago. I had most of them tested and they were all positive. Because of that I had to stop breeding geckos and with a few exceptions stopped increasing my collection. During the first year I lost about half of my geckos, which included over 30 who had hatched in my home: I don't mean that I lost 30 hatchlings, but that I had an unusually large number of geckos due to all the hatchlings, which I now couldn't ethically sell. Since then, I've lost a few geckos every year to crypto. I haven't had any deaths in over a year, but they're all still positive even if they test negative sometimes because they're not shedding parasite. Crypto is not going to die out; it's there to stay. With a group of crypto geckos you have 2 choices: have all your geckos put down, completely clean every enclosure with an ammonia solution and let them air dry, throw away all your gecko furniture and get new stuff and then start again. The other choice is to stop adding to the collection and enjoy the geckos that aren't showing symptoms for as long as they're healthy. At the moment I have 26 geckos and 1 bearded dragon. Except for the bearded dragon, who's almost 6, and an electric blue day gecko who's about 2, the rest of the geckos range in age from 9 to nearly 20 --Spencer, one of my crested geckos will be 20 at the end of the summer. I've had him since he was a month old.

Aliza