First Time Beardie Owner. :) A little advice though?

[LadyGene]

Hi everybody!

I'm a first-time bearded dragon owner and I've had my cute little beardies for just over two weeks now. They are around 9-10 weeks old and their genders are unknown.
I first saw my little beardies in the pet shop a few weeks ago and just utterly fell in love with them the second I saw them. About a week later on complete impulse, I went crazy and brought two of them. They were almost sold to another lady, but I had jumped in there just seconds before her! I was so glad I hadn't lost the ones I fell in love with in the store! Anyway..
My beardies are currently set up in a 48"x18"x18" wooden vivarium but within the next few months I am planning on increasing this to 48"x24"x24" vivarium. However, after discovering your website today and having a good look around I am now utterly confused about their lighting and heating situation! They currently have the Exo-Terra Heat Glo Infrared Heat Lamp in the left hand side of their vivairum and the Exo-Terra Repti-Glo 10.0 26W Compact bulb in the middle of their vivarium (this was all upon the recommendation of the guy serving us in our pet store). I would like to know what everybody's opinions are on these lamps (especially the UVB one) because after reading multiple articles on this website about them, my mind has been blown away and I'm now worried that this may not be good enough for my little ones as I do not understand about the wave-lengths and other technical details. My beardies have a large basking rock that is placed inbetween the UVB bulb and the heat lamp meaning that when my beardies are basking, they are no further than 6-10inches away from either bulb depending on where they choose to lay. (I also have a piece of wood on the cool side of the vivarium they they can either lay on or hide underneath). When I get their new vivarium (possibly in January or February) I plan on giving them the best surroundings they could possibly have and I want to make sure they are getting the best lighting they possibly can. I'm afraid I don't yet have thermometers in there quite yet, so I can't give you a heat reading for either side of their vivarium, but I will be getting one soon as I can afford to. As for their diet, they are mainly feeding off of crickets, watercress (which they absolutely love) and wild rocket as these are the only things we can get them to eat right now. They don't eat a large amount of crickets compared to how many other users say theirs eat. Ours eat about 6-10 3rd Size Silent Crickets a day and munch on their veg whenever they feel like it. Their substrate right now is newspaper, which gets changed every 2 or 3 days and we'll probably move them on to sand when they're about a year old.

Any advice would be much appreciated and I promise to upload some pictures of them within the next few days.

Thanks!
Love Ginar.

(P.S. While one of our beardies is very friendly, loves being stroked and doesn't mind being picked up, our other one runs away from mine and my boyfriends hand whenever we try to go near them. My boyfriend is better at picking the fellow up than I am, but he struggled for a few seconds, calms down for a few minutes, struggles for a few seconds again and it can carry on like this for a while. Is this normal behaviour for such a young bearded dragon? We try and get them used to our hand by one of us putting a hand next to them in the vivarium for at least half an hour every day and we never pick them up or approach them for above. Do you reckon our skittery little fellow will be like this for long or will he/she grow out of it over time? Thanks again.)

 

[beardie parents]

First off, most on here prefer tile to sand. It's good that you aren't housing on sand at their age. Most babies are real lickers and they will get impacted with sand. Some adults are like that, but most aren't. The other problem with sand is that it will get loaded with bacteria as they poop/pee in it and it's hard/impossible to get all the stuff out every time they go unless you do a complete sand change every time they poop which gets to be a little much.

About the uvb. The coil you're using is not good. Tracie (drache613) wrote a little intro into uvb lighting and the needs of beardies. Here is the link to it: http://www.beardeddragon.org/articles/uvintro/.
I suggest you take out the coil uvb and put a reptisun 10 tube in. It should be the length of the tank. If you have a large enough tank, which is seems like you do have, you can use one of the mercury vapor bulbs. The best two are the mega ray and the t-rex. We use the t-rex on our girls' tanks but it gets the tanks a little to hot during the summer months, especially since our girls don't like it too much over 100F.

The 100watt MVB's need to be at least 12 inches away from your beardie's basking spot. The 160 watt needs to be at least 18 inches from the basking spot.

BTW, you need to not house your two together as most beardies don't take that well and some even attack their tank mates, sometimes unto death. The minimum you need for each dragon is a 40 breeder tank which is 36 inches long by 18 inches wide (at the bottom).

I hope this helps you a little. I know that Tracie's article will give you some insite into why we recommend what we do in the way of uvb bulbs.

 

[tank4102]

same as above.

 

[TwistedCrayon]

Hello and welcome, ixna the andsa, por favor.....=)

 

[Twobeardieguy]

Hello and Welcome!

 

[LadyGene]

Thanks for the welcomes and thanks for the advice!
I have now just purchased the ReptiSUN 10.0 tube bulb and a fitting that'll be put in the second we get our new vivarium (which will hopefully be very soon). As it goes in regards to keeping our beardies together, I think I'm pretty lucky. Our beaded dragons get along quite well with each other and tend to sleep next to each other at night. They also seem uphappy if we split them when we take them out of their vivarium. =/ It was recommended to get two in the pet store, but obviously not many people on here agree with that. If it looks like they are starting to disagree with each other, then I will certainly split them up straight away, but for now they seem to be getting along quite nicely.

 

[SarahUK]

Hello and welcome! :wave:

I know it may look like your beardies get on very well at the moment but unfortunately there are many issues involved with keeping beardies together. When they reach a few months old one may very well become more dominant than the other and prevent it from reaching the basking spot, eating etc. If you turn out to have one male and one female it can become very stressful on the female due to the male wanting to breed excessively (a few owners of males on here can probably report how their males act when they are 'in the mood' and spy a female!...) Also 2 males can fight and that can cause fatal injuries. Also as babies they can (accidentaly or not) nip each others toes off... the list goes on.

Im sorry, i know its probably not what you want to hear, and i know that vivs are expensive and take up room. Its very tempting to keep them together because other animals like dogs etc benefit from each others company, but beardies really are solitary creatures in the wild. We'd all hate for something to happen to your two *hugs*