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Reptiles

Heat, UVB, humidity and the husbandry mistakes that cause most illness.

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ReptilesMichael14d agoWhat did you get wrong in your first setup?Almost everyone starts with something the pet store sold them that turned out to be wrong. The substrate, a heat rock, the wrong bulb, a tank that was never going to be big enough. Saying it out loud here saves the next person the same mistake.0 repliesNo vet yet
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ReptilesPawsRx Team14d agoWhat is your exact heat and light setup, and how long did it take to get right?Species, enclosure size, what is on the warm end, what you are measuring with, and where the numbers land. The specifics are what help somebody else. Also worth saying how many times you changed it before it held steady.0 repliesNo vet yet
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ReptilesNate15d agoIf your reptile keeps getting sick, suspect the thermometer before the animalMost reptile illness that walks into an exotic vet traces back to temperature, humidity or light rather than something the animal caught. Get the box right and a surprising number of problems just stop happening. Start with what you're measuring temperature with. Those stick on dial gauges that come in starter kits are close to useless. They read air near the glass and they're often badly off. What you want is a digital probe sitting on the basking surface where the animal actually puts its body, plus an infrared temp gun to spot check surfaces around the enclosure. Two tools, measuring two different things, and you want both. You also need a gradient, not a temperature. Reptiles are ectotherms and thermoregulate by moving, so the enclosure has to have a warm end and a cool end so the animal can pick. An enclosure that's one uniform temperature takes that choice away no matter how correct the single number is. Heat source on one side, always. No heat rocks, and no unregulated heat mats. Reptiles don't reliably move away from contact heat that's burning them, and the result is belly burns that take months to heal. Anything producing heat goes on a thermostat, no exceptions and no "it's only a small mat." Humidity is the other half of it. Run it too low and you get stuck sheds, retained eye caps on snakes, and retained shed on toes that constricts until the animal loses the toe, plus kidney trouble over the long run. Run it too high with poor ventilation and you get respiratory infections and scale rot. The right number is species specific and worth actually looking up. Which is the real point here. A ball python, a crested gecko, a bearded dragon and a leopard gecko want meaningfully different setups, even though the pet store will happily sell the same starter kit for all four. Look up your species, not "reptiles."0 repliesNo vet yet
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ReptilesPawsRx Team15d agoYour UVB bulb is probably dead and still turning onThis one catches conscientious owners, which is exactly what makes it worth posting. UVB bulbs stop producing usable UVB long before they stop producing visible light. The bulb looks identical. It switches on, the enclosure is bright, everything seems fine, and the animal has quietly been getting nothing for months. The rough replacement schedule manufacturers give: T5 tubes about every 12 months, T8 tubes about every 6, mercury vapor somewhere around 6 to 9, and the compact coil bulbs are shortest at roughly 3 to 6. The entire system for staying on top of this is writing the install date on the bulb in sharpie the day you put it in. Without UVB a reptile can't make vitamin D3, without D3 it can't use dietary calcium, and the end of that road is metabolic bone disease. Rubbery jaw, bowed legs, tremors and twitching, kinked spine, lethargy, fractures from nothing much. Early MBD is largely reversible. Advanced MBD leaves permanent deformity. It's one of the most common things exotic vets see in captive reptiles and it's a husbandry problem almost every time, not bad luck. Two other things that quietly kill your UVB. Glass and most plastics block it, so a bulb sitting on a glass lid is doing very little for the animal underneath. It wants to be over mesh, or mounted inside the enclosure. And distance matters a lot since intensity drops off fast, so the same bulb hung too high is effectively a weaker bulb. Check what the manufacturer specifies for distance and mesh, because it varies by product. If you'd rather know than guess, a Solarmeter 6.5 reads UVB output directly. Not cheap, but if you keep several animals it pays for itself in the bulbs you didn't need to replace on schedule and the one you didn't realize was dead.0 repliesNo vet yet

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A free pet health forum, open to read without an account and free to post in. It is split by animal rather than run as one room, because a rabbit question and a labrador question have almost nothing to do with each other and the exotic ones get buried everywhere else.

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Nobody minds a beginner question, and the ones that get the best answers are specific: the animal, how long it has been going on, and what you have already tried. The guides cover the questions that come up most, including finding a vet who treats exotics and what to ask when you call a clinic.