Bioactive and Enriched Desert Vivarium Part II: Leopard Gecko Setup

In this video I show you how I set-up a bioactive desert vivarium for my leopard gecko. In part one I discussed substrate and lighting and provided several natural history and husbandry references. You can watch that video here:    • Bioactive and Enriched Desert Vivarium Part I  

The update video of how this vivarium is doing at five months after the initial setup can be viewed here:    • Bioactive and Enriched Desert Vivarium Par...  

The enclosure is a standard 40g breeder I picked up used. To light this vivarium I used an LED panel, a regular 5000k LED bulb, and a 60W blue incandescent reptile bulb for heat.

As a general note about impactions: sand obstructions/impactions can and do occur in geckos. These are likely either due to underlying health problems that compromise gut motility, or nutrient deficient animals that are eating a large amount of substrate in an attempt to obtain necessary minerals from the environment. My position is that a healthy, properly fed animal kept in appropriate parameters is exceedingly unlikely to get a GI obstruction from natural substrate, and I would rather take that risk than deprive my animals of the ability to perform digging behaviors. Dogs fairly frequently get GI obstructions requiring hospitalization or surgery from eating toys (probably much more frequently than reptiles getting substrate impactions), but dog owners have not adopted a mentality that no dogs should ever be able to play with toys again. I am extending this logic to my reptiles. I was considering making a video discussing this specifically, but I found one from another channel that I think is a fairly good resource and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel:    • Is Sand Safe For Bearded Dragons?  

Sources:
1) Mojave Desert Wildflowers: A Field Guide To Wildflowers, Trees, And Shrubs Of The Mojave Desert ISBN-13 : 978-0762780334

2) Growing Joshua Trees from seed:    • Growing Joshua Trees from Seeds for 3 Years  

3) The Herpetoculture of Leopard Geckos: ISBN-10: 0974297127

4) Herpetology of habitat types of Pakistan (Table 1): https://www.researchgate.net/publicat...

Music: The "Spaghetti Western Collection" by Brett Van Donsel. "Amazement", "Western Spaghetti", "Cowboy Lullaby", and "Ghosts of California" are free tracks obtained from YouTube audio library .

Disclaimer: The opinions in this presentation are my own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of any organizations I am affiliated with. I have no affiliation with any of the sources cited, nor any products discussed.