It is not for nothing that leopard geckos are equally popular with beginners and experienced reptile keepers:
With their striking colouring and large eyes, the approximately 20-centimetre long leopard geckos are real beauties, which also become trusting very quickly and eat out of their owner’s hand, or even use it as a climbing tree use.
Also, keeping these pretty reptiles is relatively easy, so they are also suitable for beginners.
What should you watch out for when keeping leopard geckos?
Leopard geckos should always be kept with at least one member of their species.
You can put a male with around three to four females in the terrarium if you want offspring.
For a single female, living together with the lovable male usually quickly becomes too exhausting.
Otherwise, groups of pure females also usually work, in which the individual animals should be approximately the same size.
Male animals, on the other hand, should not be kept together.
Driven by their hormones, they often get involved in turf and power struggles, which in the worst case, can be fatal.
The crepuscular and nocturnal geckos need a sufficiently large terrarium with trunks, branches, bark, cork walls, caves and stones to climb, hide and look out for.
Solid, clean sand with a relatively high proportion of clay is well suited for the soil.
The bottom layer should be thick enough for the reptiles to dig in.
The carnivores fed with crickets, grasshoppers, and beetle larvae are on the menu of some birds of prey in the wild.
They instinctively react stressed when you take them out of the terrarium from above – it is ideal if you can open the terrarium from the front or the side.
As a location for the gecko dwelling, you should choose a quiet, bright place where the animals are protected from direct sunlight, drafts, vibrations and loud noises (for example, from the stereo’s loudspeaker system or the television).
The steppe inhabitants prefer temperatures between 24 and 30 degrees during the day. At night it can be a little colder, with 18 to 20 degrees.
The humidity should be between 40 to 50 per cent (day) and 50 to 70 per cent (night).