Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Hi,
I'll be posting this in health/breeding as well, but I figured someone here may have had experience with this.
I've only had this pair for about 2 weeks, and have been providing ample opportunities for them to drink (bowl and spray), so I don't believe that it was caused by dehydration - something I read before. What I believe happened was that after the pair copulated, the male didn't reinsert his hemipenes right away (I've seen this in numerous other gecko species) and then it got dirty from the substrate thus making it unable to retract them. I've removed him from the main cage and put him in a seprate inclosure with paper towls as the substrate. I've already soaked his rear end in luke warm water and cleaned the hemipene off as well as I could but I'm still conscerned. After looking around on the net, I read something about soaking in sugar water but I wanted to wait until I got a reply here.
Should I still keep him hot while his hemipene is hanging out? Or will that dry it out that much faster? I put moist paper towels in a hiding dish, with a small under-tank heater under the cage to keep moisture up within.
I'd appreciate hearing what everyone else has to say about it, plus I'd like to know what everyone uses for substrate- I'm most defianatly going to be changing it or keeping the pair seperate. I discovered his condition by the way, as I was removing two eggs from the nest box, so I guess thats ok.
Oh yes, he had a full tail yesterday, and has been drinking/eating with no problem, but I noticed that today his tail seems a bit shrunken; maybe its just me. And a visit to the vet is out (well improbable anyway), all the ones around here freaked out about the size of these rescued WC day geckos that a buddy of mine took in. If they thought the phelsuma were small, then I'd hate to hear what they'd say about this guy.
Thanks in advance,
Trevor

a male chuckwalla with a prolasped hemipenis. Yes I used cool sugar water, help him down in it for about 45 mins.(helps if ya have someone there to talk with or can watch tv time goes quicker)

Anyway after that I carefully dried him as best as I could without touching that part.

*** And then I squirted KY-jelly lubricant all over the area to keep it MOIST. Put him to bed on towels. I did squirt some more on before I went to bed that night.

Got up in the morning to turn reptile lights on, picked him up to check and it had gone back in Looked great.

I will say this I will always keep KY-jelly in the lizard medicine arsenol now , worked so well. Thats the KEY to keep the hempenis moist.

Hope your guy does fine, and everything goes back to normal quick.
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PHEve / Eve

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