Reptile & Amphibian Forums

hi everyone, its been a while since i have posted but i am seeking advice from breeders with experience of a few years! i have several leos and fatties and i want to do a yearly worming/parasite dosing. haha i wasnt sure how to word that. i want to do everyone at once! becasue it would be a lot easier with 20 geckos. I knew a breeder who also did this once a year but i dont want to bug her because she stopped leos and fatties about a year ago now. so anyhow as you all know it is getting cooler and everyone one is slowing down with their food intake. my question is: Would this be a bad time to dose them for worms/parasites and if so when would be a good time? none of them have had it done in over a year or never at all. i think i have panacure but i am not at home at the moment. my vet said about 2 drops for anyone above 50grams once a week for 3 weeks and anyone between 49-20grams 1 drop a week. dose this sound reasonable? he is a good vet and several people use him for thier reptiles. he performed the surgery on my little fatty Vegas, to have her infected ovaries removed.

that is an old pic but you can hardly even see the scar now.

My question here is why do you feel the need to deworm your animals? If it aint broke don't fix it. In order to effectively "deworm" a reptile, you need to indentify the parasite your targeting and find the right meds to kill them. You also have to understand the parasites life cycle in order to follow up your initial treatment. Some parasites can take 6-8 months to erradicate with 3 or 4 treatments. Shotgunning with panacure once a year really isn't going to do much in the grand scheme of things. I really don't think it would be worth the effort.

panacure is broad spectrum treatment and generally covers anykind of parasite a leo can get.

it is definetly worth the effort. and it cant hurt so why not be safe than sorry."if it aint broke dont fix it" first you would have to know it "aint broke" its like preventative maint. on a car it might suck at the time but its worth it in the long run

my vet was a reptile vet for the bronx zoo. he told me that most vets are not agressive enough with panacure. rather than i dose a week he reccomended a full week of treatment.then a week off for three weeks.

its been a while but i believe that the dosage was 1ml per gram now i am not a vet and i am not sure of the dosage. so consult your vet and treat your animals. good luck Kirk

"Preventative Maintanence" is proper husbandry, that goes for any reptile. They can have a whole myriad of parasites and you'd never know, if proper husbandry is given. You can take a wild animal, bring it in captivity, and with proper husbandry it will have the majority of its parasite loads cycled off in 4-6 months. So I really don't understand why captive animals need "preventative" de-worming. Like I said before, get fecals ( note: that does mean more than one, spaced out over 2 or 3 weeks ), identify what your trying to kill, and find the meds that will kill the parasites. If it is Panacure then so be it, if not, do the reasearch and find the proper de-wormer. Alot of people don't understand that different de-wormers are available. Panacure and flagyl are the first most people think of, but not neccesarily the most effective; Think of it like a socket set, you can't use one size socket for everything can you?

I agree with Eric. You, as a person, don't run out and take a yearly dose of something on the off chance you may have a tapeworm. The process and the medication they give for parasites, in my experience, is very hard on animals. We lost our first that way, an otherwise healthy full weight gecko turned to hand /force fed after one dose. You and I as humans know there is no safe medication, everything has side effects. Why subject your gecko to side effects if here is no presented reason?

Practice good husbandry and you won't need to prevent anything. Isolate, test, and be watchful, but it is poor practice, IMHO, to treat yearly before a problem presents itself. Especially if you lure yourself into a false sense of security and one of you geckos develops something NOT treated by panacure.

If you are very concerned I agree that a yearly fecal would be money and time better spent, IMHO. Good luck
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0.1 Albino Leo Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
1.0 Dear Boyfriend
Departed: Harvey and Spock

1 ml per gram????

50-100mg / kg is considered normal, and it usually comes in a 10% solution which is 100mg/ml.

For example, a normal dose for a 50g leopard gecko @ 50mg/kg would be .025cc of the standard 100mg/ml solution. The dosage you recommend would be 50ml, which is 2000 times the recommended dose!

I think I probably should have just read this thread and that was it, but I was spurred into action. 1 ml per gram will definitely kill any parasites your Geckos have as well as your Geckos. Panacur is effective on parasites because it is a poison. That poison will also affect your Geckos. I have to agree with Eric and the others. Panacur is an effective deworming medicine, but a poor choice for a maintenance program. Aggressive treatment options should only apply if you have a definite parasite problem. I'm sorry if I offended anyone.

I understand "the dont treat it if its not broken thing" but I do indeed just want to make sure. It as you all know it will be breeding season soon again and I have added several new geckos to my colection. I do not especially want to take any chances especially being as i could loose an entire goop if one gecko has something where as Panacure is designed to kill several of the any parasites. It's not like i have anyhting wild caught (i wish i did) so it would probably not be any parasites that are not domesticated with several generations in the US. also as you all know it can take several months-a year for parasites to pop up and be noticeable. my vet lives very far away (2+hrs.) and it sounds a slight bit crazy to collect fecal samples from 20+ geckos, keep them fresh!, and do get several over a 3 week period! also when you work fulltime, go to school at night, are only 19, clean your 20+ geckos &feed every night, and pay your own bills, blah, blah. ( iguess this is the real world now) all my fat tails and leo geckos are always seperate per the rack below. if the gecko that died because of panacure it may have had something else that was wrong with it or got misdosed and had to much. just a thought im not trying to yell at anybody. im sure people will criticize me even more now because im only 19. as we all know when we first get our first geckos we are not experts and it is hard to say what we really did wrong except for the obvious. it has been a couple years now for me and i have breed and raised several but i have bought several new ones from several breeders. any how after all this my question still was never really answered! just mostly criticized....but i do understand and everyone has scared me so i may just do the geckos i am concerned about. HOWEVER my question was would this time of year be a bad idea? and would it be better after winter when everyones appetite perks back up? im sure i left out several things but o well. i want to say i appreciate EveryBodies post! i reall mean that! even the somewhat mean ones but it all helps me out!