Leopard Gecko Care Guide - Beginners Guide

Hello everyone. And welcome to the channel today. I'm gonna teach you how to take care of leopard gecko. So leopard geckos are ground dwelling lizard native to the semi desert area and arid grassland of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India size wise. They're going to get between six to 10 inches long males being bigger females being smaller, and they live a very long life. So be prepared. You're going to have this lizard for 15 to 20 plus years. I think the longest on our record is like 27. He's a male and he's still breeding. When looking for a leopard gecko tank, it's all about the size of leopard gecko. If it's a baby newborn, you can go 10 to 20 gallon. If it's more of an adult, you can go 30 to 40 gallons. What I like to use, however, bigger is better. Now, some people will say, Oh, it's too big. If you put a baby leopard gecko in like a 40 gallon tank, it's too big. It's going to get stressed out. I have started off a lot of animals and bigger tanks that way. I didn't have to upgrade in the future. And none of my animals have never been stressed out ever. So you can go ahead and start off with a big tank if you want, but remember it's okay to start for 10 to 20 gallon for a baby and you can upgrade later. This is my 40 gallon for one of my leopard geckos named Charmander. As you can see, it has branches. It has realistic clay, dirt, succulents, three hides. And this is my 30 gallon, the same thing, but it's just a little bit shorter. And I really want to get off the 30 gallons. I had two leopard geckos and some 30 gallons. They're shorter. They're the 36, 18 by 12s. And I really want to go for the 40 gallons for leopard geckos because it just offers so much more room for them to climb around. And leopard geckos do climb around. Now they can't climb up vertically like a Cresa gecko. If you hear a cricket, I'm sorry, but they can like climb on logs. They are ground dwelling. So like they climb on logs, climb around the background of my exoterra. I, one time I caught one, he like was on a, he was on the branch and he jumped up and he kind of like caught himself and he was hanging on the background. He crawled down. It's pretty neat. So they do climb a little bit, but they're not going to climb on the glass or anything like that. They just climb on, you know, ledges and stuff like that. Next up is lighting and heat. One of the most important parts of this care guide. Now leopard geckos are more of a nocturnal lizards and anything. So if you never see your gecko during the day, don't worry. Just stay up till midnight. And when the lights go out, trust me, you're going to see that little guy. Now, just because they are nocturnal does not mean you don't have to use light. I use light for all three of my tanks and tanks. I have, I use a halogen bulb, a UVB bulb and an led light. The led light is there to grow the plants. The halogen is for the heat and the UVB is for UVB. Now you don't have to use these lights at all. And that's where the heating comes into play. There are two different types of heating when it comes to leopard geckos, heat mats and heat lights. I've used both and they work. It just depends on which one you would like to use. If you go with a heat mat, make sure to get a thermostat because if you don't use a thermostat, these heat mats get extremely hot and you could cook your gecko if you're not careful. Thermostats are pretty cheap and they're really easy to work with. All you have to do is plug in your heat mat to it. Hold the set button down while you decide how hot you want the mat to get. And once you get to that temp, just let go of the buttons. You're all done. Now, if you choose light as a heat source for your leopard gecko, you have to talk about two things. Are you going bioactive or are you not? You can also add, are you going to have UVB or are you not as well? Because leopard geckos don't really need UVB. People in the hobby have been breeding leopard geckos for decades and haven't been using UVB and they've been coming out fine. However, there have been studies that UVB does provide some beneficial aspects to leopard geckos like health and other stuff as well. But it's really up to you if you want to use UVB or not. I do. It's really just personal preference. Honestly, I've, I've raised leopard geckos before and never used UVB and they turned out fine as well. Just recently, I, I'm going for like a very natural, realistic setup and UVB is outside. So I provide them UVB as well. But if you do go bioactive, you're going to need an LED light source, one that is daylight. So on the bulb, the packaging, it'll say daylight. It'll have like 5,000 K. I use a big LED strip on my 40 gallon and on other ones, I use an LED strip. That's a little bit shorter LED strip. And those are also like 5,000 K daylight bulbs as well. And they grow plants in all of my bioactive terrains. You can also, you just use a household bulb. The ones that are the circles that screw into the lamp source. You can use those as well. Those work wonderfully. I've used those on lots of tanks, including this one right here has tons of live plants in there. Those work perfectly fine. But if you don't go bioactive, you can just use a halogen bulb to heat up your tank. And when I say a halogen bulb, I literally mean just a halogen bulb. A lot of people go to a pet store and buy the ReptiBulbs, like the Zoo Med ReptiBulbs. You can use those if you want to, but you can just also go to like a Walmart or anywhere that just sells halogen household lamps. I use to heat this tank right up here. It's just like a 75 watt halogen bulb on a dimmer. Sometimes I go to 50, but it's getting really harder to find like household halogen bulbs because of this energy thing that passed recently. In some States, it's actually banned. It's really just the energy consumption thing, but any halogen bulb you can use to heat a terrarium. They're all exactly the same. It's just the bulb shape. That's the difference. So for a 10 to 20 gallon, I would recommend a 50 watt halogen bulb or lower. And for a 40 up, I would recommend something around like 75 Watts between 50 Watts. And this part really depends on you. You might have to go lower wires. You might have to get a dimmer. I use dimmers on almost every single one of my tanks. And that's because everybody's house, everybody likes their house at different temperatures. My house, it's pretty warm. Um, even in like room temperatures, it's not the reptile room. It's like 72, but in my reptile room, it is currently 78 degrees. Right now. But say you live in Canada and it's very cold outside inside your house, it gets a little cold too. You might want to bring up the watches of the lamp. So you're inside. Your house is always a constant, like 65 to 69 degrees. Then yes, bring up the wattages of the bulb to provide more heat. And that's really where it just depends really where you live and how cold or hot the inside of your house is. That's why I can't give you like a specific number of what's I get, because say that you live in a super cold place and somehow you got a leopard and inside your house, it's like 50 degrees, almost like all times. You might want to go for like a hundred watt bulb. I don't think that would be a case, but that's what, you know, I recommend is really just to get a temperature gun, make sure you have a temperature gun and get one of these right here. A digital thermometer, not one of those classic ones with a needle, get a digital thermometer. These are very good, very accurate. And they show minimum and maximums. If you get one of these at PetSmart, I don't know how much it is, but they sell the classic ones with a needle. You know, the old fashioned ones at PetSmart is like $10. I got this for $10 itself on Amazon. So get one of these. It's very helpful. And remember a temp gun is very necessary because I like to put in the wild. That's where they do. That's where I got my idea. But in the wild, they do this. There'll be a rock and the sun's just hitting it. And then when the lights go down, it absorbed all that heat and they'll come out and they'll sit on it. So I do that in my tanks as well. And my leopard geckos do that. When the lights go out, they come, they'll sit on the hotspot for a little bit and they'll start walking around their cage, they might go back in their high, they might not, but I really do like that. And if you want to do that, you can do it as well. One thing I see people use a lot, which you should not use at all is red and blue lights. You see like red light bulbs and blue light bulbs. It's supposed to represent moon night or like a red night time, which is a natural. I'm a big naturalist, like I said, but you should not use those to actually harm the reptiles because they stress them out. The reason they stress them out is it was long thought that the reptiles could not see the red or the blue light. And now we know that they can. And so to them, since they could see it, it's almost like daytime 24 seven. Not only that it's a daytime, we'll just straight red skies, like in Skyrim. So definitely don't use a red and blue light because it's going to stress them out. Remember these guys love the night time. And you'll see that when you turn off the lights and they come walking around at night. Next up is temperatures leopard geckos. Like all reptiles need a temperature gradient in their terrarium for best health. I keep my basking temperature basking. Remember basking is different from air temperature. The surface of my basking is usually between 90 and 94 degrees on the cool end of my tank, it's around 70 to 77 degrees. And on the warm side temperature, it's around 88 to 90 degrees as well. Also, it's very important. If you have a leopard gecko, that's albino. It's probably best to not use UVB because albinos have like a little bit more sensitive to UVB. So if you do have an albino gecko, I recommend just maybe not using a UVB if you don't know much about it. And if you do dive into it, you can decide for yourself then. Next up is humidity. So leopard geckos are from a dry air kind of area, but that doesn't mean that should always stay that way. Like I said, provide a humid hide. And a lot of times if you check the temperature of where they're from, like Islamabad, Pakistan, I hope I got that right, but where they're from sometimes the relative humidity in the air or the air temperature, the humidity. It's extremely high. It's around like 70%, but you kind of want your temperatures to always stay around like a 30 to 40. You can go as low as 20% humidity, 40% humidity. You can keep it around there at nighttime. That's why I say this at nighttime. If the humidity spikes and it's like 80% or 70%, something like that, that's perfectly okay too. You don't have to worry about it. As long as when the daytime lights come on, the humidity drops. Next up is a highly debated topic. And that is substrate. Now I'm one for naturalistic environments. Like I said, so all my leopard geckos are on substrate. However, if you don't want to do that, you can keep them on tiles. Some people keep them on paper towels. Some people keep them on like linoleum type stuff. One thing I recommend not keeping leopard geckos on is reptile carpet. This is very popular in the reptile hobby, reptile carpet. Honestly, it doesn't provide any humidity at all. Not only that, all of my leopard geckos used to get their toes caught in the reptile carpet and they would like, you know, like pull up real hard and you can see it really wasn't comfortable for them. Also it holds bacteria exceptionally well. So like I said, a lot of times it doesn't have good humidity. It's like really dry. So some people will like spray their tank and then, uh, the leopard gecko poops. It's like really good at just harboring and bringing up bacteria. A lot of people say that they get respiratory infections from it because of the bacteria. And if they need to bring up the humidity, the humid hide box brings up the humidity and it's just a recipe for disaster. So don't use reptile carpet. Um, it's really just up to you on what you want to do. Like I said, I'm naturalistic. So I highly recommend, uh, you know, like I have my own mix. It's a top soil play sand with peat moss mix, and it's like 50% peat moss, 30% top soil, and just mix in sand. I really can't tell you like an exact definition. I have a video of how I make it on my channel. If you want to check that out as well, I'll have that linked in the description. However, there's a lot of people who use the like 40% top soil, 40% sand, and 20% excavator clay by Zoo Med. The excavator clay is kind of expensive. You can find it on Chewy, but it is a little bit more expensive. However, I love the excavator clay as well. One in my naturalistic terrarium, I see like, it kind of looks like that. It's like a rocky clay substance. That's actually from like the, like New Mexico area. So there's just like natural, uh, like, so if you live in like Arizona, you probably can just take the dirt from outside. You can bake it. A lot of people bake it like 200 degrees for like an hour. So I kill anything that's in there and then they let it cool off, obviously, and put it in their terrariums. So I do that as well. I get like my branches from outside, my rocks from outside, uh, most of the decor. And let's go ahead and talk about decor. Um, in my enclosures, I like to use branches, rocks, and you don't have to go to a pet store and buy this. You can, because a lot of times pet stores sell some really dope looking branches, but it's very expensive. And I'm all for saving money. I have a lot of animals and I'm really for saving money. So I go outside. One place you could go outside is just the woods. Go get some flat rocks. I get all my rocks from outside, all my branches from outside. All my branches are oak branches. Oak is very safe for reptiles. So I'll go find an oak tree. And it's very easy to identify this. It's by leaves. You can just look up oak leaves and it'll show you what they look like. You go find an oak tree. And I literally just start cutting off limbs that I like, and I put them in my enclosures. You can disinfect them. Sometimes I don't disinfect them at all in my air enclosures, because once I throw it in there, anything that's going to usually needs like, you know, water and stuff in my air enclosures don't have any of that. So I'll put that in. I might let it, I'm going to cut it off. I do let it sit for like a day or two in the sun. Just let the sun dry it out and just hit it hard on like a, just a table outside. But there's a lot of people will like soak them or put them in like the oven and also do the same thing, 200 degrees an hour, two hours, depends. But I honestly don't do that. It's really just personal preference. If you want to do that or you don't want to do it. So on the decor part, again, like I said, I do keep all the branches and everything like that, but I do provide them with three different types of hides, a cool hide on the cool side, a humid hide, and a hot hide, a hot hide that it can be dry and it could be like, I usually keep that one directly under the, um, basking bulb. So that way it's pretty warm inside of there. And then the humid hides kind of in the middle. So it does get a little humid, but it's kind of cool. And then the cool high on the cool high is just there on the cool end. And you can make this out of like rocks. I've made some out of rocks where like, if you do make it on rocks, make sure you put the rocks on the bottom of the tank because a lot of people don't know this, but leopard geckos like to dig. I've had leopard geckos once they find out that they can like maybe dig a tunnel underneath the rock. They'll dig a tunnel underneath the rock and they'll make like a little hide. I've had leopard gecko do that under some cork bark and they made themselves a little home, a little burrow, and it was pretty neat to watch. So I make sure if you do do that, put rocks on the bottom and kind of stack them. So that way, if they do dig underneath it and there's nothing like no support and it falls, it doesn't crush her and kill your leopard gecko. You don't have to just buy a hide from a store. I have, I do in one of my cages, but you can also just make like naturally make a humid hide out of like cork bark and just make sure it's like kind of moist sphagnum moss inside of there. And you can spray it every now and then make sure the humidity's up. So you really can just get creative on how you make the hides. So next up is feeding leopard geckos themselves are insectivores, which means they eat primarily insects in the wild that eat beetles, grasshoppers, spiders, scorpions, and other insects. They have also been observed preying on smaller snakes and lizards. Good feeder insects include crickets, mealworms, small super worms, hornworms, dubia roaches, discord roaches, red runner roaches, black soldier, fly larva, and much, much more. I feed my geckos like this. Juveniles get fed daily as much as they can eat in a 15 minutes timespan, maybe twice a day, but usually once young adults get fed every other day and adults whose tail is fatter than their neck can be fed every five days. But if their tail isn't so fat, I feed them two to three times a week and only one roach or like three mealworms on those days. And one thing to keep in mind, do not keep your feeder insects in the cage with your lizard. If they don't eat it, take it out of the cage because this is going to be very surprising. If you keep a feeder insect in there, you're like, Oh, this little insect can't hurt the lizard. Wrong. There's been cases of where like crickets, like four crickets were in there hiding out and the lizard fell asleep while the lizard was sleeping. They just ate its tail off or ate a piece of chunk out of it. I don't know how the lizards don't wake up. But that does happen to people. So take those insects out. If they do not eat the insects, I always offer live insects. You might see like the can of crickets or something like that. I've never used that because of my leopard geckos. I mean, I've tried it in the past. My leopard geckos never seem to care for it because they're, they're in hunt mode. A lot of lizards, they see stuff moving and that's when they want to go for it. And if it's sitting there not moving, they're not going to want to eat it. And plus all the juices, the good stuff that's inside of it's dried out. So it's not really that healthy for your leopard gecko. And again, I'm sorry if you hear crickets, I breed crickets. So they're so loud right now and they're just right behind me. One thing important to note, if you're not using UVB light, you should really dust your crickets with calcium powder D3. And if you are using a UVB light, you don't have to use a D3 calcium powder. You can just use powder without D3. Now, calcium supplement wise, I do dust my crickets with calcium D3 two to three times a week for young leopard geckos. And then once a week for adults, this is very important. So that way they don't develop metabolic bone disease. Like I said, reptiles are very reliant on like UVB and the sun for that calcium. But since they are nocturnal lizards, they don't have to have it. That's why you give them the powder supplement with D3. And if they don't, they can get metabolic bone disease and it can lead to weak bones or deformities on the gecko. So we've talked about some food. Let's talk about water. I do leave a small water dish in my leopard geckos enclosure. And I replace that water every day with some spring water. Now I've never observed my leopard geckos drinking water droplets off of like leaves or anything like that. But remember they do get a lot of moisture from the bugs that they eat. So that's why I do not recommend the dry bugs. I highly recommend crickets and stuff like, you know, other things with a lot of moisture content, because they do get the moisture from their crickets as well as the water bowl. So now we've covered the basics of care. Let's get into behaviors. You're going to see your leopard gecko doing some funny things. And I'm going to talk to you about them. So that way you're not like, Whoa, is this normal for a leopard gecko? The first one is tail waving or like a tail rattle. They don't make any sounds, but their tail like shakes a lot of times when they're hunting or if they see another leopard gecko males do this a lot of times when they see like females or other males or something like that. They might wag their tail. Um, this is pretty normal. It's just very normal. It's like babies do that a lot when they're hunting and sometimes adults as well, they like see something that's kind of cute and their tail just starts shaking stuff and they're about to get it. It's like almost like a little dance before they eat it. That's very normal. So don't worry about it. But next up is something that's not normal. I mean, I guess some people call it normal. I myself don't call it normal at all. And that is glass surfing. Glass surfing is where like the lizard looks like it's trying to escape. He's like running against the glass, running back and forth. None of my lizards do that except ones that I don't think I've fully like mastered their environment. And my philosophy is if it's glass surfing, then something in the cage is not right. So I should, if the leopard gecko is doing this during the day, if they're doing it during the day, then I really do feel like maybe something's not right in your cage, or maybe they're just very, very bored, which is again, goes in the same hand in hand. But my philosophy is if you get a tank and you provide everything for that animal where they feel safe and it's truly their home, they won't glass surf. They'll like where they're at and they're not going to try to escape. Next up is squeaky or hissing. I could, should say hissing, hissing or chirping leopard geckos do this when they're like in trouble, scared, or they're like, when you let them go, don't mess with them. I think, I mean, I can't, I haven't heard it in so long, but I think like baby leopard geckos, it's all like, ah, something like that. It sounds like crazy. It's like, and then adults, it kind of like makes like a chirp sound. Um, if you hear that and you're not interacting with them, make sure to check in their cage. Maybe something's scaring them, or they got a tail or foot stuck. Check it out because that's usually a sign of distress. One thing you can see as well as incomplete shed. You might like see some shed left on their hand or some part of their body. And what that means is you need to raise the humidity inside of the tank. When leopard geckos shed, they do need a lot of humidity and that's why you provide a human hide. So that way they could go in there and get humid and leopard geckos will eat their shed. One thing you're going to notice is when you get leopard gecko, he's going to be just like pulling off his skin, just like, I'm just ripping it off his body and he's going to eat it. They eat their own skin and they do shed quite a lot. So don't get alarmed when he's eating his own skin or you come out or he looks a little gray. He's like looking like white and you're like, well, what's going on with him next day? He looks beautiful, colorful again. That means during the night when he woke up, he ate his skin. Also want to mention when they do get scared, leopard geckos will drop their tails, their tails will fall off when they're really stressed, but. They will grow back. However, when they grow back, they're not going to look as pretty as when you had them before. They're going to look all bulgy and I've never had a leopard gecko drop its tail, but thank goodness I didn't. Cause I really do not like the look of when their tails fall off, but they do this when they're extremely stressed. So remember if your leopard gecko is telling you to leave it alone, leave it alone, otherwise his tail can fall off next up, it's not really behavior, but it kind of just fit into this area. It's cohabiting. Can I keep two lizards in the same tank? And I, myself personally say no. Some people do and get away with it, but they're more advanced. They've been doing this a long time. But if you're new to the hobby, I really do not recommend it in the wild. Yes, they do live around each other, live by each other, might sleep together, but in the daytime or nighttime, they take off in opposite directions and go forage for food. But this is a tank that you're going to have your leopard gecko in almost this entire life. And the same with humans. If they're kept in the same space for too long, they're going to fight. And when leopard geckos fight, they bite, tails fall off, bad things happen. So you don't want that. So do not cohab your leopard geckos together. Anyways, that's all I have. If anyone wants to offer any other types of tips and advice, drop those down in the comments. I hope you enjoy. I hope I was some help. If you did enjoy like and subscribe, I'll see you next time.