Reptile & Amphibian Forums

So I have decided to build an 8' by 4' by 6' foot desert terrarium. I have been thinking about what to house in it and I have been contemplating chucks, collareds, or uros.

First off could these species be housed together if they had this kind of space?

Second from what I have read chucks should have like a 105 basking spot? If so and they were being housed with uros would having basking spots more around 115 affect them?

Also I have learned they are mainly herbivores but will eat crickets as well, so if I feed them there veggies and fruits before I put in crickets for collareds would the chucks avoid there veggies and wait for the chance to eat up the crickets?

I have housed collareds and uros but never chuckwallas so any advice or information about husbandry tricks with them is appreciated

thanks in advance, erik

My chucks have a 120 degree basking site and have been doing fine with it for over a year. Even though they have similar habitat requirements, I would not recommend housing uros and chucks together or uros and collareds as uros can be aggressive and territorial toward other lizards. Both uros and chucks will also consume feces, and you could run into problems with infections if they started munching on each others and picking up parasites and bacteria they're not equipped to deal with.

I've seen some people housing large collareds and chucks together successfully and I've seen these guys sharing the same habitats in the wild. If you want uros, I'd recommend housing them by themselves. If you want more than one species, I'd go with chucks and collareds. With the chuck collared mix you could even consider adding other north american desert species such as desert iguanas or some of the large spiney lizards.

If you decide to go multispecies it might be worth setting up a holding tank; I wouldn't trust a chuck with any lizard they could fit in their mouth so depending on the sizes of the lizards you acquire you may have to grow some up a bit. You would also want to quarentine new arrivals before adding them to the mix, especially if dealing with wild caught animals. This way you could monitor the health of new additions, and if one had something that needed treatment you would just have to treat that one rather than all your lizards.

-Alice