If you had all your Fringe-Toed's in the same enclosure die, and they were all relatively the same size, or the prey size was large relative to all of them...then maybe they all got sick from prey size problems and developed ataxia...but it's kind of a long shot that this would happen in all of them like that.

It's possible that there was one that developed a problem due to prey, got infected with something communicable from stomach/intestinal inflammation ( like a viral or bacterial enteritis ), and it spread to the others. Maybe contributed to by lowered immune response, and heavy parasitation, due to captive stress.

It had to be an environmental factor common to them all though, or a communicable pathogen. The two solare I lost last year were under similar circumstances; and crickets, along with parasites, and captive stress related immune disfunction, might have actually been the cause.

I had success initially in the first case with acidified ( acedic acid ) water, and tetracycline ( per Montanucci's notes ), and stomach tube force feeding. The lizard had nearly recovered over a 2 week period, then died suddenly as soon as treatment was scaled back and she was off tube feeding. The second died a few days later.

In his maintenance and husbandry paper, Montanucci had offered a poor opinion of crickets as feeders and believed dirty crickets to be a possible cause for most cases of fatal gastroenteritis. The symptoms I noted were exactly the one's he laid out in his paper. Sounds much like the one's you noted too.
-----
"A man that should call everything by it's right name, would hardly pass the streets without being knocked down as a common enemy." The Complete Works of George Savile, First Marquess of Halifax 1912,246

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Hide Replies ]