Reptile & Amphibian Forums

What is the best substrate to use?
Would tile work, or does it not hold enough moisture?
What about bed a beast?

Thanks for any help!

Tile won't work unless you are keeping leopard geckos, bed a beast is horrible from what I hear for just about anything.

Substrate really depends on what you are looking for: ease of maintenance, natural look, or growing something?

For young cresteds papertowels are the best, a layer or two and a few crumpled ones to create some "leaf litter". This is because you don't really want anything loose if you are feeding supplemental prey items such as crickets. (no accidental ingestion of substrate.) It is also easier, from my perspective, to monitor food in = food out on papertowels for young ones.

For us, we live in a very high humidity area (well, in the summer anyway) and have mold problems everywhere. We continue to use papertowels for all our geckos because they are easiest to replace weekly and hold humidity well. We mist once daily "after dark" and this allows a slight drying during the day to control mold growth. I can also tell you papertowels go through their digestion system just fine. Our aggressive little hunter figured on not waiting until the cricket let go of the papertowel before chomping it down when she was about 3 months and ate the cricket and a small piece of towel. It was a tense 24 hours with the us ready to call the vet, but everything came out all right in or through the end depending on your perspective.

I'm sure other people will chime in with their favorites as well, I'm a little out of the loop these days due to living in mold central. Good luck, hope this helps a little.

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0.1 Albino Leo Gecko
0.1 Crested Gecko
1.0 Dear Boyfriend
Departed: Harvey and Spock

Thanks for the idea! I plan to get a juvi, so I'll just keep it on paper towels for the first few months at least. It sound much easier to clean and I wont have to worry about them injesting it.