Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am right now using reptile carpetting in my leopard gecko tank and it has been working fine, but it does not support a natural look what-so-ever. The carpetting is green and just isn't the look that I am looking for. I know that calcium sand is not a great choice, but is natural looking and I also know that slate works well. I would prefer using the sand over anything, so if anyone knows of any good calcium sand brands that would not harm a gecko please tell me. Both of my geckos (a breeding pair) are over six inches in length so I am not too worried about anything other than impaction. If I cannot find a good brand of calcium sand I will just use large peices of slate and then fill in the gaps with the sand. Thanks for any advice that is given!

Hey i understand how you feel, Im using sand and i know i'll get blasted by ppl on the forum but hey its A-ok. I enjoy watching them dig and creat little shallows and holes that they like.
Both my geckos are fed in a dish at meal times. So i watch them eat, the only time they could possible injest sand is during shedding. other than that i've had one for 4 years on sand.
I like the tile idea though. I read some posts about that calc sand apparently 100% safe for geckos and i really wouldn't trust that. I think they're just trying to charge more.

What do you feed, mealworms?

And crix, i havne't asked the pet stores if they have other bugs. But i will soon. When feeding the crix I tend to semi decapitate them first so that they don't escape. So i only feed them crix a few times a week.

But I really agree that you have to be careful with sand. Like line their hides with paper towel, cuz well sand gets gross. And if you use vercumulate or that sort of stuff they'll kick it everywhere and it'll mix in with the sand, however that's totally your call. I just thought it looked weird.

Okay. I just changed all my tanks from sand to repti-carpet. However, I am not Anti-sand. Once my 2 males get adult size, I will more then likely change them back as those are my to "display" tanks. As a retail manager of a pet store, I've tried pretty much everything out there. In my honest opinion, I think the best choice for you right now is Reptilite by Carib Sea. It has much finer grains then the Calci-sand and doesn't "bead" as much when wet either. They have patented a "round grain" which is their claim to fame for this stuff. I don't know about the grains being round, but I do know up until the point where I added a layer of ESU Lizard Litter to mine that I never had a problem.

Jeff