Posted by:
roger van couwen
at Sat Apr 15 16:24:36 2006 [ Report Abuse ] [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by roger van couwen ]
fixture. I was dumbfounded. He had disappeared. But he had no chance to get away. I was crushed. Then one day, there he was! Then disappeared again. Finally I saw him scrabble through a space at the end of the fixture. The female didn't yet have voluntary extended hiding, so I got some ABS pipe and hot melt glued it to the floor then snapped it off, so the pipe does not roll around. I slide in a few leaves of newspaper so she's not just skittering around in there.
She got a real bad infection that progressed way faster than I was used to. I'm used to large lizard and slow progression. She had a full body stench. The lab found three virulent bacteria that are very sensitive to Baytril. Every other day I medicate them both with 0.2 of 0.1 ml. Baytril. That's 0.02. Tiny. Every day I have to hydrate her twice with 0.3 ml water, and feed her once with 0.3 ml of some smooth meat-based food the vet gave me, whatever cricks she will accept from me. I modified the tips of some one-ml syringes to make forcing an easy one-man job. But all that attention and handling must be stressing the hell out of her. Once she gets a Clear from the vet, I'm going to leave her alone completely except for offering her crickets from a long hand-made bamboo tweezer.
She hunts like crazy, but has *zero* luck even when I flood the habitat with new 3/8 crickets; she runs up to them and they bounce away. Once in a while she'll take a tweezered one from me. I need a much longer tweezer. I need to spend the time to de-leg a couple dozen crickets so she can get some hunting confidence. The male has better luck hunting, and knows how to drink from a saucer. I've never seen the female drink.
The sheds are there, they are just so wispy that I didn't see them before. The male is quite plump and strong, and now the female is recovered enough to make it hard for me to catch her, and her lateral folds are gone. Catch her from above is wrong I know.
I never have approved of glass tanks and here I am using one. I should build a wood habitat with front-opening doors. I will. A couple of months ago I ditched a 5' wide X 3' deep X 5' tall Ctenosaurus pectinata habitat because I didn't believe I could disinfect it well enough. It took about four hours to build another one, disassemble it and reassemble it in the herp room. It will be much easier to build this small one.
Well anyway, thanks for your time,
Roger
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