When one end of an enclosure is heated, the heat can creep throughout the whole enclosure, leaving the resident no place to cool off. I've seen it in the past, where some lizards will start out feeding OK, then after a while it seems as if all they want is to get out.

One day a few years ago, I was visiting the off-exhibit area of a very successful zoo, and saw that they were breeding Texas HLs. They had experienced losses until they hit on the idea of venting the cage by cutting a hole in the side just at the heat lamp and installing an axial fan to draw off warm air, leaving the HLs to absorb heat from radiant energy only, as in Nature. The results were most impressive, with the baby HLs thriving, growing up healthy, and thermoregulating much more happily by basking for a while, then running around the rest of the large cage, even spending quite a bit of time at the cool end where the temps were in the upper 70s.

Since then, I've installed axial fans in all my cages that have a basking light. The basking spot heats to around 95-100 for snakes like Coachwhips, and hotter for desert lizards. Axial fans can be bought from Grainger for under $30 and come in different flow rates (55 cubic feet per minute, 75 cfm, etc). I cut an intake vent hole in the opposite end of the cage for air to flow in to replace the vented air.

I'm confident that most of the visitors to this site are already successful keepers, but if anyone feels like reducing collateral heating in cages or trying a new system to see if the animals like it better, venting the heat source could be one aspect to consider. It really worked wonders at the zoo, and I very much like the results at home.

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