Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have been bathing my ig for a few days now but i still cant get rid of the mites any help would be nice. he has a black mites scar and i hope it doesnt stay there forever cause my iguana has very nice red scales and i dont want them to be scarred!

New to iggies, but this is what I would do for tegus and snakes.

1)Purchase either a can of Provent-A-Mite spray or Equate Lice Bedding Spray from Wal-Mart's pharmacy section. I'm not going to get into the differences here, but some prefer PAM to Equate, but Equate is cheaper.

2)Take everything out of the cage.

3)Follow the directions VERY carefully and spray the enclosure inside and out. You just need a light mist, don't saturate, and hold it the recommended distance away.

4)Spray the cage furnishings in the same way, or clean with a 10% bleach solution. If you use the bleach solution, make sure you rinse everything so that no bleach odor remains.

5)Clean anything else that goes into the cage with a 10% bleach solution, and rinse very well until there are no bleach odors.

6)When you put everything back together, make sure that everything is dry and that no lingering odors are present that could indicate residual chemicals. Also, as a precaution, I would wait and put the water bowl in the next day to make sure a wet animal didn't reactivate any chemicals. Likewise, I wouldn't mist for a day or two. Iguanas require more humidity, but should be fine for a day. As an alternative, you can have another cage for a day or so, but then you need to treat that one after he's been in it.

Mites will crawl out of the cage, so I always spray about a 2ft area around the cage as well, whether it be my carpeted floor, a table stand, etc. The chemicals are safe when dry, but toxic when freshly wet. Do not spray them on the lizard or let him into a wet cage.

In the meantime, you can continue with the diluted Betadine soaks. Reptile Relief didn't work that great for me, and I've never tried Nix. When I needed to get rid of mites, I used newspaper as the substrate and even sprayed the newspaper at every change. I did this for about three weeks, and was able to completely get rid of the mites after the next shed (it was a large snake).

thank you very much. i took out his old substrate and replaced it with news paper and tomorrow is payday so i will be going to the store to look around for the best thing. i saw on a web site that you can use rid shampoo on the iguana and that works very well. but anyway thanks again for the help