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Lighting/Enclosures
Enclosure ventilation and humidity
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[QUOTE="Axil, post: 2021385, member: 117612"] Let me address this first. I didn't read any rudeness or condescension into your words. On the contrary I found your responses well reasoned and respectful. Conversely I hope I don't come up off as diminishing or disregarding the knowledge and wisdom you've gained from years of hands on experience with the animal I am attempting to better understand and care for. The opposite is true. I am very grateful you've chosen to share some of the benefits of that experience with myself and others here. I do not have many strongly held opinions on the subject of Bearded Dragons, as my experience is very limited. I try to make a point to use words like "may", "might", "could" and "I think" to indicate this lack of certainty. Any lack of such qualifiers is more likely to be am oversight on my part than a declaration of certainty. Consequently I am eminently persuadable on these questions, which is why I very much enjoy these discussions. And I agree with these sentiments wholeheartedly. While I appreciate keepers here telling me the correct way to care for my Dragon, I am most excited to [B]why[/B] a practice is correct. A lack of understanding on the reasoning behind a practice can, in my experience, lead to incorrect and potentially dangerous inferences in the face of novel circumstance. So again, I thank you for giving me a glimpse into your thought processes. Well... that was a long preamble! I think the lesson I am learning here is where I mostly considered temperature to be somthing I could get sorted out, and make minor adjustments to as I increased the ventilation to whatever I wanted. In reality temperature, and the gradient I want to achieve may be so closely tied to ventilation it doesn't make much sense to talk about one without the other. That was likely what you were trying to convey in the thread that spawned this post that went over my head. I read: "use ventilation to establish your temperature then don't worry about it" when perhaps the correct take away was "establishing your thermal gradient will [B]dictate[/B] your ventilation" as there isn't as much ability to change the ventilation in given enclosure without throwing the gradient off. There were a couple other things I thought were interesting in your post I wanted to clarify/discuss: Does it make sense for a respiratory infection to be contracted from direct contact with food? I would think it would have to be inhaled from the air to enter the respiratory system. In my head contamination was most prevalent/dangerous when it found a way to take root and multiply in the system, rather than introduced as a one off in food. Reptile carpet is generally discouraged for this reason. This is pretty compelling evidence that if ventilation does play a role in controlling RI's, whatever you have is sufficient to realize that benefit. At least within the range of conditions you've kept your Dragons in. I don't know how much your humidity fluctuates. And while i've focused on humidity, that's only because i've seen it brought up repeatedly as the cause or exacerbating factor in RI's and fungal infections, and i have at least some understanding of many pathogens need for moisture to survive. In reality It may well be that the fact I keep chickens or have a stream full of frogs behind my house creates more risk than any small difference in ventilation can effectively mitigate. While I haven't seen any studies that confirm Dragons to be dew drinkers, my point was for that to even be a possibility dew must be regular occurrence over most of their range. This goes back to my point about dangerous inferences. Perhaps the theory is fundamentally flawed and dew is rare in thier habitat. If we assume dew is common though I believe your point here reinforces mine. When humidity is highest, the Dragons exposure is naturally the lowest, thus ventilation quickly removing humidity as the enclosure warms would be beneficial and more closely mirror the environment they've adapted to. Anecdotally, Beebz does seem to shed much easier than when the humidity was dropping to 7-9% in his enclosure. That may not be the reason, but the changes i noticed tracked reasonably well with the humidity levels. That was i believe a rather extreme scenario though. The air was noticeably uncomfortable for humans even without a heat lamp beaming down on us. A situation I hope to have remedied before next winter. A post you made on the subject of raising humidity actually prompted me to do a dive into climate in Australia and in my specific situation Beebz was experiencing humidity that as far as I was able to ascertain only occurred in a small part of the Dragons natural range, and even then only for a few hours a day during a specific season. Anyway, i'll leave that there as like you mentioned there humidity is a pretty complex and seemingly controversial subject for which i've seen experienced keepers give advice ranging from. "Try to keep it as low as possible at all times" to "provide a humid hide, and try to make sure humidity reaches 70% at night" Maybe one of these days if i find myself building an enclosure I'll try something like this. As it is, i don't feel i interpret Dragon behavior well enough to identify such an experiment having a negative impact. I could probably fill a whole forum section with threads on [b]that[/b] topic. What is "lethargy", how do i quantify it? How much can i read into changes in coloration, etc? Why does Beebz sleep in different places? Why did he push his basking decor far enough away from the wall to get behind it?! I could go on. :p [/QUOTE]
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