This weekend I got a visit from Phillip my cousin from France, Phillip has been working with iguanids and varanids for more then 30 years, but he’s a surgeon by profession. Anyway sins we exchange regularly, like me he started keeping acanthosaura last year, however he followed husbandry advice from an other European keeper who’s been keeping acanthosaura’s for a long time.
This was his reaction to my lizards, first he tough the colors where simply awesome! Then he could not believe how energetic my acanthosaura where, his are mostly lethargic and rarely move throughout the day, he took a few temperature readings of both lizards and ambient, at first he was going to say these temps are way to hot, but then something unexpected happened, lizards he was trying to take temp readings would jump and run off, how come they do this? Jesus these are acting like freaken red-heads! All those iv seen move little if al all, you should post about this I am sure other keepers don’t know how these lizards are active.
Well I never really paid much attention to this as I haven’t seen other keepers acanthosaura in real life. I assumed mine where acting normal? In fact they are acting normal, when peoples telling me there dragons stayed at the same place all day, I assumed the dragon moved without them seeing, as most peoples don’t have the luxury of being around there lizards all day, therefore they miss most of the action, but no my cousin confirmed that his actually stay in the same position a full day sometime more before moving. That’s crazy! I would never keep such boring creatures.
Mine jump run and will dart at the feed bowl when ever I throw a handful of insects, in fact if I don’t feed them and I open the cages one or 2 will jump on me, this out going temperament is what I like about them.
Day time body temperature of 84f is the temperature that most of my dragons seem to prefer, if given the choice this is where they choose to be at, I feel this temp allows proper metabolism witch allows full body function, if your lizards are not moving a lot, especially if they show little to no interest in food, then perhaps you should check your temps. Forget about the misconception of these lizards being from cool mountain forests, its 97f and cloudy today anywhere in south Vietnam.
rgds
