Read a lot of books.
I don't know of an alligator lizard specific book, but much of their husbandry has things in common with other reptiles.

And experience including failures.

Last year a couple of my babies simply died - I did some searching on the web and found that high humidity can cause respiratory stress especially in young reptiles, so I changed their setup to less humid and they stopped dying.

Then I had a tail shed problem - the babies wouldn't shed the skin on their tail, and I would have to soak the tail and manually remove it - so I added a humidity chamber (one of those snake caves) with damp moss in it - and that problem went away.

Unfortunately since there isn't a lot of published data on their captive care, mistakes are going to happen - you have to be able to learn from those mistakes.

Even with kingsnakes for which there is a lot of published care data - it's been a learning experience with some mistakes.
-----
3.6 L. getula californiae - 16 eggs (Cal. King)
1.1 L. getula nigrita (MBK)
1.0 Pantherophis guttatus guttatus (Corn)
0.1 Pituophis catenifer catenifer (Pacific gopher)
3.3 Elgaria multicarinata multicarinata - 14 eggs (Cal. Alligator Lizard)

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