Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi there. I have a question that I hope some of the expertise in this forum may shed light on. I was brought a female beardie of indeterminate age a little over a month ago. She had clearly been mistreated and underfed. Her appetite has bounced back, and she eats like a horse. Since in my care, she's put on about 40g in weight, but not much length at all. She's currently 13.5" and 178g, but I believe is older than her size suggests. I've had no luck getting a solid age on her, but it sounds like she may be as much as a year old. My question is: could she grow to a normal adult size or is she destined to be small forever? Is there anything other than proper husbandry that can help her grow?

If it helps, her current conditions:
-4x2x2 cage with lots of basking, hide spots
-temperature gradient from 80 on the cool side to 110 under the main basking spot
- Reptisun 10.0 compact fluorescent by the main basking spot
- Suplemented with Calcium, D3, and vitamins, plus parazap monthly
- Her fecal is clean
- Rep-Cal pellets, roaches, crickets, superworms daily
- Collard, mustard. turnip greens daily

Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer.

Kris

Only time will tell if she grows in length. Being underfed and probably underweight when you bought her, she may put weight on first to get to an ideal weight for her size, before growing any length. It is good she is doing well under your care and everything you are doing looks good but one month is a bit too soon to say if she will grow length wise or not. I would wait till at least 6 months have passed before thinking her past poor treatment has stunted her growth permanently.

Age deffinitely would be hard to determine,unless you can find out how long the previous owner had the dragon and if they remember how old or at least how big it was when they bought the dragon. If bought as a baby from a petstore, most likely it would have been between 1-3 months old. This gives a baseline on determining age, if the previous owner had it only for 6 months, then the age would fall between 7-9 months etc. If you can't get ahold of or don't know who the previous owner was, very difficult to tell the age of the dragon. I do beleive dragons will grow length wise up to 2 years of age before stopping growth completely in that direction.
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PHLdyPayne