soloman5

I've got ferns, herbs, some grasses and I sometimes put in young nikau palms, (they loved eating those, so they never last long) I've got to continually water the plants otherwise I find they dry up really quickly. My wd's all eat a wide variety of fruit, lettuce and veges, but then so does my Beardie which by the sounds isn't that common for them to do so.

I'm not really up with the frog thing but why have and are the numbers dropping so badly? My partner use to farm out the back of Huntly and he said that there were huge amounts of frogs everywhere literally all through the paddocks. He was having a yack to his old farm boss the other day and he was saying over the last few years the frogs seem to have disappeared to basically zilch there don't seem to be any left in the dams or near the water ways either. Just wondered if anyone had any thoughts as to why this would be?

What are they types of blue tongue that you can get in NZ and do they prefer to be kept at certain temperatures or are they not too worried?

My enclosure is 1200 high and I really wished I had made it at least 2000 high. Am going to do an extension though as mine love going to the highest spots, and only go down onto the ground to cool down and eat the bugs running around.

I think water dragons are great abit of work in setting them up but once done a piece of cake to look after, cleaning is easy just have a filter in their water. I let mine out regularly, just to roam in the lounge I don't pick them up but let them climb up onto me which they do when hand feeding them, and heaps of fun to watch. :bounce:

Just found out that wd's their sex is not determined by chromosome so what I wrote isn't valid oops :oops:

Does anyone know the chromosomes pattern for the water dragon, which would make it easier to work out.

As far as I know once an egg has been layed the sex of the wd has already been determined so the wd has it's dna from the start, then in incubation the sex is then determined by temperature, but dna does not change even though the sex of the dragon does. In theory a wd which was a male from the start but incubatored in female temperatures will develop but not as a full proper male so it probably won't have all of the male physical looks or be able to reproduce. If my thinking is right how does dna testing work when no doubt it is possible for alot of "female" dragons to actually have started as male so the dna would be invalid, and again in theory there could be alot of "male" dragons mistaken as females because they don't colour up since they were incubatored as female????? :roll: :roll: :-? :-? :-?

Mine are small brown bugs? Deffinately not white.

What do the mites look like as I also noticed I had a couple of really small bug type things in my colony but weren't sure if they were mites or not as I've never seen them before. I just fished mine out as it literally were only 2 or 3 that I could find.

I have one basking bulb but the way I've set up the logs there are different areas for them to lie on all within a similar distance of the bulb, generally they seem to scrap lower down and near the water entry. They do love to lie on the ramp (turtles entry into his basking spot) maybe if I create more places for them to lie in the water may help. Thanks for your suggestions.

I'll keep an eye on them through today and see how things go, so far they are behaving, since it's a nice day I'll put 2 of them outside, let them have some "time out". :roll: The w.d's you had with this scenario were they females?

That I did work out . Would you recommend to do it on a permanent basis or just for awhile? Thanks for the help by the way

In regards to the 2 fighting no idea on sex, I assume they are female since there is no colour on their chest although they maybe too young still to tell? They both get on fine with the one which I think is female. With seperating it will be quite difficult I maybe able to put it with my smaller w.d, it is young 9-10 months, and quite small. I was waiting for it to get a bit bigger to make sure the older ones don't see it as food.

Really gees, so do you think it would be better to seperate them then, I wasn't sure about letting nature do it's thing as I really don't want that to happen. They have only started today what I would class as fighting although the initial started a couple of weeks ago.

I have 3 water dragons together one I'm 99% sure is female (Stoic) 2 years old, the other 2 are 20 months old and am unsure of sex. The 2 which are 20 months old have started fighting. At first it was the occasional nip, head bobbing and waving but today one of them (Phoneix) is really into the other (Spartan), bitting, not letting him/her out of the water etc. Spartan has always been the bigger of the 3 with Phoenix not far behind but s/he is the one who behaves more aggressively. Phoenix's behaviour towards Stoic is very different s/he chases her around jumps on top, does a circuling thing, but there is no biting or any type of aggressive behaviour from Phoenix, every so often Stoic will nip him on the neck but that's it, she generally runs off as quick as can be. There is no redness on chest suggesting them being male. Their enclosure is 900Wx1600Lx1800h, and there is also a turtle in their water tank. There is no problem with feeding, I hand feed them most of their live food and there's never any scraping, their veges and fruit is eaten by all with no problems either. So my questions being is this behaviour just sorting out who goes where in the pecking order for females or could I have 2 males which have not coloured up? Do I keep an eye on them and let them sort it out themselves, or is it safer to take one out and if so which one? (At the moment I've been stopping them when they are scrapping.) Any suggestions would be greatfully received as have found very little info on water dragon behaiour.

Thanks all for the info, handwashing not a problem as it's just routine when handling a cleaning our pets.

That's good to hear, helps relieve the nerves. The amount of handwashing we do I'm surprised we still have skin as we handle our dragons and turtle alot.

My partner is pregnant and she has just got a turtle (we also have water dragons). I knew that you can get salmonella from turtles and reptiles, and the article I was reading up on said that pregnant women should avoid all contact with turtles/reptiles and when you have a newborn they should be removed from inside the home. Is this advice over the top???? as this is going to be very difficult for us to do.

I've got ferns in mine, I planted them about 2-3 weeks ago and they are still going good. I do water/spray them alot though, a good way to keep the humidity up too. I did put Nikau palms in but my dragons ate them so I gave up that idea. :lol: I've heard spider plants are good too for terrariums.

Good point maybe I'll try that. Our deck is really high from the ground so no cats, it would only be birds and the main ones we have in the garden are tuis, finchy type things and wood pigeons so prey wise they "generally" are ok. I always keep an eye on them regardless but it would be good to be able to go and do things without worrying about them staying put.

yeah I know what your saying I was wanting to try and incorporate the two things, totally enclosing a large deck isn't really practical for me so maybe I'll have to move them to somewhere else. Environment wise our deck is the prime place for the w.d's.

I had thought of that but we still want access to the deck as well. Would it work by doing an overhang of some sort using mesh, the same sort of theory they use with dogs to try and keep them from jumping the fence?

I'm wanting to make an outside pen for my w.ds, I'm going to do it on our deck which is a good size, lots of shade and sun plus out of the wind. I have 4 sheets of plywood that are 600hx2400l, I set them up today since it was a lovely day here but my dragons quite happily leap to the top of the ply, wait for me to come over hop on my hand and have me put them down on the ground. I wondered about attatching an overhang of some sort not sure how though? I did hope someone else may have some bright ideas of how to keep them in???

For those of you that house their reptiles outside what sort of temperatures are they in on the lower scale?