Reptile & Amphibian Forums

My plated lizard, i think its a sudan plated, burrows all day and we havnt seen him in two days. last night we tried poking around and he jumped out from under his substrate. Is this normal? Has anyone had this problem? What should I do?

Please post a Pic (blackish belly is strange and excludes sudanese...) and carefully describe your setup.
Some species do burrow 90% of daytime, especially some Zonosaurus

Were using reptibedding woodchips, he has a basking light, a plastic branch thing, a little plastic rock hideaway, a plastic rock water dish. It is around 70-85 in his cage and we are runnign a 14 hr light schedule. We have yet to get a UVB light but we plan to today or tomorrow. We are feeding him red wrigglers and lettuce. The store said he was a sudan plated lizard. And it was a very nice clean pet store.
Ill try to get a pic of him in the picture gallery.

Possibly he is feeling way too cold. At the basking area, more than 110 F must be reached to allow proper thermoregulation.
Typically they stay digged if they do not find a brigth and HOT place for thermoregulation
Also I do not like your subrtrate. Round graiend dust free sand is the subtrate of choice for plateds with a moister cornmer wit some moss or mulch for sleeping, shedding and hydration.
Also do not forget that these lizards do come from light intensive habitats. So tank lights are almost dimn in comparison to what they are adaptet to. Hence a metal halide of 150 W and up should be present in its setup, to give best light intenisites.

Hope that helps

Ingo

i got a picture of it. we also will have a new, bigger cage for him by the end of the week, we ordered it from lllreptile

The pic is blurry, but that definitely is a Leiocephalus schreibersi from Haiti and thus not at all related to plated lizards.
The ID is 100%!!!!
Its normal for this species to stay buried most of the day. They need a sandy setup with fine grained dust free sand to dig in and a hot and bright (metal halide!) basking area.

what do i feed it what else do i need to know

As I said..hot, bright, sandy..think of an haitian beach. They eat the usual feeder insect. Some take some greens, many specimens don´t.
Googeling with the scientific name will bring up a lot. A very common pet reptile.

Ci@o

Ingo