Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I have not been keeping up on the forums and have not seen the posts on this beautiful lizard. I have contacted kingsnake about posting a care sheet on them and have posted a pic of a female since none seemed to be available. This is info from my experiance with them:

Heating: Tree Dragons enjoy almost room temperature weather, the ideal basking temp is 75°-80° Fahrenheit. The ambient temperature should be from the low to mid 70's. The quickest way to kill a Japalura Splendida is to over heat it. Several exhibitors at a reptile show ask me how mine were so healthy and they could not even keep them. It turned out they were heating them as a tropical lizard and I was only using a UVB and no heat.

Humidity: They enjoy and thrive in a very humid environment. A large water dish is required as well as multiple spray bottle mistings per day or an ultrasonic mister. They love to gather in a big water dish and will stay in there a long time, all lined up around the edge. My wife calls it a “hot tub party”.

If you would like a copy of my care sheet please email me at vin-exo@sbcglobal.net. My customers who are using this to care for their pets are having good sucess so if it is not 100% accurate it is close.

That’s a beautiful lizard, did you hatch it?

I hope to get some eventually.

About your husbandry, can you tell me more?
I am always interested in other peoples experience.

No Jobi, I did not hatch it. I do not breed. No time. I own a pet store and that is a picture of a lizard for sale after rehab. I have been successful keeping them as have my customers. Email me at vin-exo@sbcglobal.net and I will send you what has worked for me.

This is a great species but they are all wild caught and I hate that! These need to be captive bred but from what I can find out they have few eggs. Get some, breed them. This needs to be done.

Mike

Mike that is all I do breed new species for the trade, been at it full time these past 25 years. Both my best friends are suppliers in Canada. Whenever theirs something of interest they ask me to try them out. These are my first painted agamas, they look bad cause I took them out of the egg, an other practise no breeders do.

jobi, you're everywhere. This hobby/business needs MANY more people like you. Keep me in mind for some of your lizards.

Mike

Why do you take them out of the egg?
Do you want to allow enrichment of strains which loose the ability to hatch spontaneously?
Is there any other reason to do so? Especially for a species which is that easy to breed?
Which reasons are there?

Ci@o

Ingo

Theirs a good reason to manually hatch them!

I got the eggs from gravid imports, they nested the next day I got them.
A common symptom for such embryo is the lack of egg tooth, they cant hatch.

I know eggs well enough to see when they should hatch, a few more days and they are dead full term. As for a strong strain, this has everything to do with proper husbandry of females and good nesting options, dead embryo’s just don’t do it.

Now that we are talking about it, I manually hatch many eggs from 3-4-5 generation reptiles simply to save time, this has absolutely no consequence on healthy babies.

However opening an egg to soon will kill the embryo, opening weak eggs will kill them too, but I feel you already know all about this.

Oh, they do breed readily in captivity. But there are two problems with that: People tend to ignore that they are not tripocal lizardas and that they need a special setup including lots of water and cold nights.
The second thing is that people twend to preferlarge, parasite infested attractive cheap wildcaught specimens over tiny healthy less cheap cb babies.
In the near future there will be a book available on their captive care and breeding by Esther Laue, who has great success with them since years.
Sadly this book will not be available in english.

Best regards

Ingo

>>Oh, they do breed readily in captivity. But there are two problems with that: People tend to ignore that they are not tripocal lizardas and that they need a special setup including lots of water and cold nights.
>>The second thing is that people twend to preferlarge, parasite infested attractive cheap wildcaught specimens over tiny healthy less cheap cb babies.

Oh my gosh, I thought for a moment that you were talking about my MHDS! No, not really, but this seems to be the big problem with too many of the cheap imports. I refer to them as "disposible pets." That is what has kept me going with my MHDs for 8 years. I am determined to convince people that the WC are not the way to go unless you are planning to set up a breeding group.

I also try to get people interested in breeding other reptiles that haven't been bred before. How can you do that, learn what their native habitat is. There are too many lazy herpers out there that don't want to take the time to learn something new. Too many want to be told ever step of the process. Or, they buy the WC specimens and kill them.

Sorry, this is one of my soapboxes and was the theme of my
presentation at the Midwest Herpetological Symposium in 2003.
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Marcia - FroggieB Dragons
www.froggieb.com/MHDHome.html