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hello, reptil tv community and welcome to a new episode of reptil tv. you probably already know today's intro animal from the "africa" episode. today i want to show you what a magnificent fellow our leucistic nile monitor has become; just look at his colour! the piglet pink has almost disappeared and he has developed a lovely pure white with a slight bluish cast. he's not terribly fond of me, as you can probably hear. he always interacts rather coolly with me. but i'm certain that we'll become friends. i wanted to show him to you today to let you see how he has developed.
and now comes the best of all, apart from our "nils" here, for i have acquired a little brother for him. it seemed that the african, who reared this nile monitor, had a second one, which he didn't let on about when i was over there. but fortunately, i think he needed the money and so wanted to sell the second one. he offered it to me a few weeks ago and here it is, all the way from africa to be with us. and the african monitor makes a good comparison, a really good specimen, i would say.
in comparison with our nile monitor you can see his development, but now the little one is here with us we have two of them. i wanted to show you for they are going to the canaries in the next one to three weeks. there on the canaries, jim patter usually breeds komodo dragons. so we teamed up and he is taking the animals and we hope that we can breed yet more white nile monitors. we are sticking with the theme of lizards, but not the really big or even huge nile monitors, but the really lovely little hand-sized geckos. today's topic is the crested gecko, because we get lots of requests on our youtube site
to give some information on the crested gecko. so here we are, here come the crested geckos. formerly rhacodactylus ciliatus, they are now called correlophus ciliatus. they were renamed in 2012 for some reason; i don't know why. we wanted to discuss this new caledonian crested gecko today. as the name indicates, it comes from new caledonia. that is an island north of australia. it lives in the trees there; in fact it is a classic tree-dweller. it scrambles around on the trees. in the literature you read that it spends a lot of time
on the smaller branches and less on the trunk and on the large boughs. the reason for this may be that it shares its habitat with rhacodactylus leachianus. in other words, the leachie geckos, which are among the largest geckos in existence; they can grow to about 500 grams in weight. unfortunately, they eat the poor ciliatus and so the ciliatus spends more time on the thinner branches and the leachies on the thick trunks. it definitely does not live in the heart of the forest, but around the forest edges or on a tree standing alone. in the literature you read of them on fence posts. there they pause, sit on the stem and trust to their camouflage colouring.
here we have a really good comparison of size. in my left hand this adult male with a body length of 10-12 centimetres and next to him a 3-month-old juvenile. the young are scarcely half the size of the one i have on my hand here. this is what they look like at about 3 months; i think that is a sensible age, at which you should acquire them for your terrarium. i would not recommend getting them any smaller, but at this size they do not pose any problems. the good thing about these animals is that they are incredibly well-behaved. you can see this in the animals which i have on my hands. this is the first time since i acquired this animal that i have put it on my hand. we don't have the time to take out the animals and handle them.
so this is probably the first or second time that it has been on a human hand. and you can see that there is no great problem. the adult animal, which i also had on my hand, is similar; he stayed calm the whole time. if you take them out they may leap away from you, but that is all. this makes the animals almost too lovely for the terrarium owner, the fact that they are easy to handle and that they are not timid. that they don't bite is also good, of course. the one thing you must be careful of is this: they can shed their tails. not as easily as that, or at the slightest scare, but if i held it by its tail and it wanted to escape, then it would leave its tail behind. you often see specimens in terrariums or in nature,
which have no tail. the animal’s body stops just behind the cloaca, when they shed their tail. it does not grow back again, so if you have a crested gecko, mind out for the tail. do not hold it by the tail and then it will stay as lovely as it is now. now i want to show you how to set up a crested gecko terrarium. here you see this enormous case. it measures 60 x 60 x 100 centimetres to comply with animal management regulations. to meet the minimum requirements, you need 6 x 6 x 8 times the gecko's head to torso length. we see that the animal's head to torso length is about 10 centimetres, so we need 60 x 60 x 80 as a minimum to comply with the animal management regulations and this means a terrarium of this size.
perfect for an adult pair, or two females and one male. talking of keeping them, you can also keep geckos in small groups. one male and two females, in pairs or individual males or females. to keep everything just right for the animals you should not house only males together. so, to the organisation of the terrarium. first of all, we have the soil substrate. i have chosen reptile bark, which is a moist pine substrate. we can make this good and wet and this gives good air humidity. then we have here the various decorative materials, which i will use in the terrarium.
i have already inserted the cork branch. as i said it is a climber, and it likes to climb a lot, therefore i put in as much climbing equipment as possible. here we have plastic plants, simply to put a little greenery in the terrarium. that always looks attractive and the animal can also hide in it. however, rhacodactylus prefers to rely on its camouflage in these earth colours. but, as i said, it looks more attractive and also when you spray into the terrarium the plastic leaves retain the moisture and increase the air humidity. and finally, the technology we are going to use. you need a day-time climate of 26-28 degrees. at night everything should cool down; that is really simple.
in the day-time i recommend lighting to give off uv light. either these energy-saver bulbs with 7% uvb or these tubes also have a good uv ratio. depending on the size of your terrarium you can also install one or two tubes, instead of the energy-saver bulb. and for light as such and for warmth you can use a basking spot. so, i will install two lights in combination. there is some controversy about uv light for geckos, for some people maintain that they do not need uv light, since they are nocturnal animals. i favour uv light for lizard terrariums.
i don't think it harms the animal, in fact i think it is a positive feature. they will take in uv light even with relatively weak lights. they are close to the light bulb and the uv light helps to prevent rickets. so much for installation. i will put all of this together and then we will see each other again. so there it is! i am not the world's best interior designer - perhaps you can see that! however, the animals have lots of climbing opportunities. i have mounted the energy-saver lamp with the uv ratio relatively close to the branch, for the reason that it does not become particularly hot. so contact is no problem.
this lamp, which becomes relatively hot, has to be mounted far enough away to prevent the animal touching it and burning itself. this is not a problem with the energy-saver lamp. then we have here the thermo-hygrometer, which we do not attach yet. first of all, we test the individual temperature zones. earlier i said 26 to 28 degrees. i also wondered earlier what 26 to 28 degrees means. do i choose 26, 27 or 28 degrees? this simply means that there are various temperature zones in the terrarium. higher up it is warmer and so can be 28 degrees. here below in the corner it will probably be 25 degrees and that is ok. in this zone you should
move between 26 and 28 degrees. more specifically, directly beneath the spotlight it will be warmer, about 30 degrees. but it is the temperature zone in the air in the terrarium, which is meant. that you must measure throughout. i have not connected the cables for the lamps yet. that would take too much time to install them. here you must install heat-resistant silicone cables. once everything is installed, switch it on for 10 hours a day and you will have a perfect rhacodactylus terrarium. my production team is reminding me that i shouldn't use the term
rhacodactylus, or rhaco for short. at some stage i even called it a leopard gecko. as i said before, they are now called correlophus ciliatus, but the old term, rhacodactylus or more colloquially, rhaco is burnt into my memory. i will probably still be saying it 10 years from now, but i don't think it's a problem. now we put our treasure into the terrarium, and pass on quickly to crested geckos as a whole. striking colours are very popular right now. crested geckos or ciliatus are inherently amazingly variable. in the wild they come in many different earth tones up to reddish or yellowish tones.
and of course, in terrariums we try to develop these colours further and to continue to breed. we have fire and there are also dalmatians with these dalmatian spots. fire is reddish, and then there is harlequin, which has this pattern. there is tiger with a sort of banded pattern, or there is patternless, e.g. patternless yellow. there are many others. we try to bring out the colours. mostly the intermediate colouring is passed on, which means we try to show these colours by line breeding. this makes the hobby more interesting, because you can expand still further. now we put this little fellow in here. one more little aside;
you may have noticed that this poor fellow is lacking his front foot. for this reason, he has for a long time been our protã©gã© here. we look after him, because no-one wants him with this blemish. but it makes no difference to him and so today he is making his appearance on reptil tv. you can see that we are attached to each other and he doesn't want to let go of me. that is the classic behaviour; they just sit around and trust to their camouflage. they don't even need hiding places or hollows. finally, to come to rhacodactylus breeding. they propagate relatively successfully. you can tell this from the price. a few years ago, they cost a couple of hundred euros.
in fact, there is a prohibition on exporting them from new caledonia, so no animals may be sent from there. there were only a few animals in zoos or in one or two collections. it wasn’t until the last few years that breeding became amazingly successful and so the prices for the animals have become completely affordable. and that is thanks to good breeding in terrariums. they are stimulated by dormancy in winter, so for 2-3 months you turn the temperature down a few degrees, to a good 20 degrees. at night you continue to switch everything off. this stimulates the animals and as soon as it becomes warmer they begin to mate. the female then lays 6-8 clutches of eggs per year. a clutch usually consists of two eggs. another important point is that they do not affix their clutch to anything or hide it
somewhere in a tree, they bury the eggs. this means that you must install really good containers, in which they can deposit their eggs, in places where they can really bury their eggs. then you take them out and put them in an incubator and about 60 days later you have lovely little crested gecko babies. you can control the whole process with temperature, for cooler temperatures produce females and if they are incubated at a slightly warmer temperature, say towards 30 degrees, more males hatch. so you can control sex to some extent in breeding and start a great breeding cycle. the topic of feeding is also very interesting and exciting for crested geckos. first of all, they have to be fed insects. sometimes people maintain that they should be fed a completely vegetarian diet or simply with fruit pulp. this is definitely not correct...
especially as juveniles they must be fed every second day with insects. for an adult animal it is enough to feed them 2-3 medium sized grasshoppers or large crickets once a week. choose something that jumps and leaps and not worms. grasshoppers are a good choice, because they are relatively slow and don't escape so quickly. i think they are the best insect food. to make eating exciting you can give them plenty of fruit pulp. herpetal is now offering a completely new range of jellies. they come in little pots, which you open and put in the terrarium. for many years now herba vital have offered these nectars - banana, mango and others, five different kinds in all from herba vital. you can offer these fruit pulps almost every day; with juveniles i would offer them
every day, with an adult at least every second day. in addition, for the juveniles insects 3-4 times a week and once a week for adult animals. a really important point, which you must on no account get wrong. here we have the uv light in the terrarium, but there are many people who rear the animals without it. in this case, it is really important that you feed minerals and vitamin d3, for example from herpetal "complete t". here is the new design, which has just come fresh onto the market. it is now completely in black, but it used to look like this. mix 2 to 1 with minerals or calcium or with this from herba vital or the dsa from nekton as a calcium-d3 supplement.
you can add it to the insects as we have often explained and shown. or you can mix it into the fruit pulp, otherwise the animals will develop rickets and you will have no more pleasure in them. once more quickly to the jelly. it is of course practical not to put it on the ground, but place it as far as possible at animal height. either offer the little pot in the fork of a branch or build a holder for it. as i said, these little herba med jellies can be put on a crown cap; especially for juveniles, crown caps are very suitable, for they can simply lick the nectar. similarly with water, it is no use installing a water bowl;
they just don't drink from it. the animals actually absorb water from dew or when you spray to maintain high air humidity. you could also use an irrigation system. the animals lick up this spray or rain water and thus absorb moisture. as always, we end with recommendations on good literature. here, from henkel & schmidt (herpeton verlag) there is the old classic, "rhacodactylus". a fantastic book, with lots of information, so if you are interested in rhacodactylus, i recommend you to take this book to heart. n-tv verlag used to publish "art fã¼r art", a good crested gecko book. however, it is not available at the moment, but you might find it somewhere in the book trade. possibly it will be published again. these are two books about the animals,
which i can definitely recommend to you. so stay loyal and check out my films and check on geckos.