Green Lacertas

[jpanis]

Hello all,

back in 1986 until 1996 or so, I bred Lacerta viridis and Lacerta lepida (in those days), combining and indoor enclosure in spring and fall using spots and halogen lights at basking spots, with a outdoor vivarium of 3 m by 1,5 min summertime. The best results came with L. lepida as they also ate pinkies (newborn mice) with was good for their calcium metabolism when growing and laying eggs. I think that much had to do with direct sunlight (UV) as vitamines like A and D can be overdosed when you powder crickets with vitamins and calcium or add it to drinking water. You keep dealing with very small animals and are never sure about the dose and activity of the vitamines administered... Also the metabolism of reptiles can change very fast due to their dependance of heat from outside. So it is a far more easy job letting nature take care of the business using the sun as ideal regulator of calcium metabolism, I think.
I started combining indoor and outdoor vivarium because I think that the lizards lacked heat to become reproductive after a sometimes too long winter.
I caught some Lacerta viridis in the wild back then, I must admit. The Lacerta lepida were F2, so my offspring was F3. What was rather obvious is that the vivid colours of the wild caught specimens faded in captivity : they weren't as shiny after a few years. I also had some problems raising L. viridis offspring because they refused pinkies and I could not put them in the outdoor vivarium then : they would be eaten I suppose... What was also a problem was that crickets escaped from the vivarium and spread around in the neighbourhood into other peoples bedrooms and so... I remember the lizards were fond of large green grashoppers (7cm) I caught (not an easy job...)
Anyway, I would like to start over again with green Lacertas in the near future. It is nice to know that people are busy breeding legally obtained lizards. Do they have to be F3? It would be great if anyone would want to discuss keeping and breeding lizards "method 2007" by email or so. You can find my address in the members list.

Sincerely,

Johan (Belgian doing his best writing in english)

I will do my best trying to find old photos of the outdoor vivarium. Is was destroyed by my father one day in 1997 as a cat found her way in the vivarium and killed the largest part of my collection. It all happened in just a few days, so beware!!! Use nets or something.

[morbid]

What a great story! All except the end ofcourse.
Thanks for sharing..

I would be glad to discuss further breeding with you. And it can be done here in the forum, I think..
There is other persons here that surley know a bit or two about this.

//Miqe

Oh.. I almost forgot.. Welcome to the forum!!

[jpanis]

Well ,

there are a lot of topics to discuss of course.

One could start by asking to what extent one should use UV emitting heat sources sold nowadays. I can imagine that there are problems when using it with (juvenile) lizards. There seems to be a security distance that one should take into account. This means that the indoor vivarium needs hight. How long and how frequent does one have to use it? If one doesn't want to, how much vitamines like A and D have to be added to the diet without risk of overdosing it? Would it be in the end not enough just to use a halogen light instead of a simple spotlight? I read somewhere that halogen emits some UV also and I have used that in the past, knowing that it would not harm the lizards...
I have a rather interesting story about this also. One must remember that back then, I was still a teenager and information on how to take care of a reptile was limited. I had to go to adults who had Lacertas and try to learn from them. Anyway, it must have been 1989 or so. After a few years of waiting an hanging on the telephone I finally found and bought a baby Green Iguana. The vivarium was standby for more than a year... But the poor thing failed to thrive. It was dull green and refused to eat all kinds of fruits that I give it. Then I came to the idea to put in under a light bulb on my desk : the glass of the bulb is light blue and it spreads the spectrum of natural daylight in a room. Under that light bulb, the iguana became light green in half an hour or so. I aimed the light on a black, plastic object to heat the animal. It was just spectacular to see the difference. This phenomenon did not occur when I put it under a normal spotlight, which emits a more yellow light spectrum. It is surely something that I will try the day I start keeping lizards again. It might be an idea for others to try also.

So, this is maybe a topic to discuss. Forgive me if this all sound a bit old fashioned. And of course I have to return to my statement that it seems to most safe idea to use the sun as the best direct source of calcium and vit D regulation.

Johan

[mark68]

There are simple solutions to your problems in the past.

1 feed the insects used as food plenty of dandelion, clover tomatoes, carrots and other good veg to provide natural vitamins for your lizards. They also should maintain nice bright colours too.
Use a little calcium powder too. Say one feed out of 5.

2 Use insects such as cockroaches and giant mealworms that can be fed from a sunken bowl in the enclosure. This avoids all the problems of escaped insects. Most of those crickets never get eaten ! It costs you alot of money. There are cockroach species available now that are very easy to breed and use like "red runners"

3 For Lacerta lepida (now Timon lepidus ) get some UV transmiting plastic to create more warmth for them without losing the UV light they need. The Lacerta viridis (western populations of this species now Lacerta bilineata) probably will not need covering other than with mesh. The walls of the enclosure should provide a sheltered spot as long as you place the enclosure in a sunny spot in the garden.

I know plenty of keepers who do this including myself and it works !