Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Welcome to kingsnake.com's message board system. Here you may share and discuss information with others about your favorite reptile and amphibian related topics such as care and feeding, caging requirements, permits and licenses, and more. Launched in 1997, the kingsnake.com message board system is one of the oldest and largest systems on the internet.

Southwestern Center for Herpetological Research
Click here to visit Classifieds

Flop-tail questions

dragonvail Dec 14, 2004 07:17 AM

Does anyone have or has seen in person a crested with flop-tail? Will their tail always flop to the same side? Do they have any control at all over their tail after flop-tail has set in?

I have a 9-month-old female that for the last two nights seems to be holding her tail at odd 45-degree angles to her right and slightly over her head. I don’t know if this is just a behavior or if she’s showing signs of developing flop-tail. She almost never hangs vertically (that I’ve seen) and prefers to wait horizontally in her plants for crickets to go by. She does sleep in a tube, but I purposely have it at a shallow angle to encourage her not to be in a vertical position. She seems to curl her tail around the plants in her cage the same as always and when she’s moving sideways along the wall her tail is perfectly straight.

She does have this weird thing that every now again she will curl up (her snout touching her back legs and tail around the rest of her) in the top back corner of her cage on the wall and sleep the day. I’ve only seen her do that four or five times and all those times her tail never looked bent like the picture of flop-tail that I’ve seen.

I acquired my two crested geckos two months ago from a friend of a friend that could not keep them any longer. The other is an adult male. When I first got them it took a while for the male to eat at all and almost a month before he would eat crickets. The female has always consumed all of her dusted crickets within minutes of being placed in the though she only started eating the CGD/babyfood in the last month. Her mother/owner before me hatched her and says that she has always been good about eating her crickets and CGD/babyfood and that the period that she wasn’t eating the CGD/babyfood she was probably still stressed from being shipped.

So am I being over concerned or does my baby have a problem?

Replies (2)

umop_apisdn Dec 14, 2004 11:26 AM

i have a single female that turned out to have floppy tail. i cant say exactly what caused it to develop, because i have always had her in enclosures with a lot to climb on, and i always supplemented her crickets with calcium dust. it doesnt hurt her, although i could kinda tell it was forming before it was totally noticeable by the depression at the base of her tail. it usually just flops backward, theres no fixed position for the tail to flop in. for some reason, her tail seems less "detached" than pics ive seen of other cresteds with floppy tail. people have mentioned that it can lead to twisting of the pelvic bones in extreme cases, which is the only real threat i have heard of from floppy tail.

flamedcrestie Dec 14, 2004 12:09 PM

i too acquired a female with flop tail. it would bend straight over towards her head when hanging on walls and i would always find her like that which is why i believe that it occurred. it didn't seem to effect her and in my opinion may have even been a bit of a help. it seemed as though she could use it prehensily in both directions rather than just towards the sticky pad side. no other real issues with it other than just the way it looks

Site Tools