bergmite
Member
Hello everyone! I hope you all had a great New Years.
A while back I posted a lot about my baby dragon, Toast. Just wanted to start by saying eating is no longer the slightest issue for him and thank you all for the help. It was likely just relocation stress that lasted longer than expected.
I estimate that Toast is about 5 months old now. He’s a bit over 10 inches. He’s outgrown the milligram scale I initially bought for him, but at a vet visit 2 weeks ago I was told he was a healthy weight and size for his age. I’ll attach pictures of him and the tank at the end.
Here’s a summary of the problem, since I’m going to try to be as thorough as possible and it will likely be a very long post: Toast has been showing symptoms of MBD for a little over a month now. It started with slacking his arm under himself after he’d get picked up and put back down, but now he does it in his tank and will walk on his wrists occasionally, or he’ll just relax into a position with his arm straightened by his side. He can still run and will usually correct his feet into a normal position if nudged a bit, but I’m really at a loss for what could be causing this. After a vet visit we have him on a liquid calcium supplement and I’ve been better about dusting his food with Repti Calcium (without D3). I was admittedly bad about the calcium supplements for a couple of weeks, but I don’t know if that’s enough to start MBD. It’s been 2 weeks since we started him on his supplements and it’s either the same or gotten slightly worse. I understand that it can take time to improve, but I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to correct it.
Okay, on to the bulk of the post… let’s start with tank specs.
Temperatures: The hot side ranges from 115-103 degrees Fahrenheit. The cool side is 80-77. I take my temperatures regularly with a heat gun from Home Depot.
Tank: 20 gallons (I actually have a 40 gallon tank unopened in my room at the moment— I got it in a couple of days ago and just need to purchase materials for it before moving him) I don’t use the screen at the top at all anymore, since there are no other animals or people in the house I’m worried about getting into the tank.
UVB: Zoo Med Reptisun 10.0 UVB T5 HO Reptile Terrarium, 24-watt bulb. The hood that it’s in is reflective. At our vet visit 2 weeks ago, they tested the bulb and told us it’s working great.
Heat: Repti Basking Spot Lamp 75w, white bulb.
Substrate: Ceramic tiles.
In the tank: I have a rock on the hot side and a rock on the cool side. A little fake plant I’m probably going to replace when I move him since he can’t really climb on it like he did when he was tiny. You’ll notice I also have a little dish in the tank— I use that for salads and discoid roaches and offer water outside the tank to prevent the humidity from rising.
Next, I’ll go over his diet:
As I mentioned I offer water daily, sometimes multiple times a day, outside of the tank. He is usually receptive to gently tapping a water dish.
He eats mainly crickets, 2-3 times a day, but I try to mix it up. He’ll eat discoid roaches, horn worms, and meal worms occasionally. I was very gingerly about the meal worms at first, but after my husband accidentally fed him quite a few and he had no problems passing stool afterwards, I’ve been a little more relaxed about them. He goes crazy for them so it’s hard to resist.
For greens, he doesn’t really seem interested in anything but collared greens yet. I’ve tried a very long list of vegetables and other leaves. Even then he isn’t great about eating them— maybe every few days he’ll munch on one or two, and he tends to favor the crunchy dried up ones. Not very nutritional, Toast…
For the record, we did bring a stool sample to check for parasites during the vet visit and it came back negative.
As I mentioned in the summary at the beginning, the main concern arises with the way he’s walking and resting. He’s lightning fast and a great runner when hunting crickets during feeding time, but he will often slack his wrist or arms. Since he walks on them normally a lot I’m hopeful this isn’t a major issue and can be worked out, but I feel like there’s still a lot I don’t know and that it’s really tough to find a good reptile vet. I’m doing everything instructed by the vet (even let up on the hornworms a lot because I was told they might be bad for calcium absorption) but I really wanted a second opinion from the forum. Thank you all so much for reading all of this.
Here are some pictures of him and the tank. I didn’t have any pictures or videos of him on his wrist and I didn’t want to bother him too much, but there is a picture of him after I picked him up and set him down on my hand.
A while back I posted a lot about my baby dragon, Toast. Just wanted to start by saying eating is no longer the slightest issue for him and thank you all for the help. It was likely just relocation stress that lasted longer than expected.
I estimate that Toast is about 5 months old now. He’s a bit over 10 inches. He’s outgrown the milligram scale I initially bought for him, but at a vet visit 2 weeks ago I was told he was a healthy weight and size for his age. I’ll attach pictures of him and the tank at the end.
Here’s a summary of the problem, since I’m going to try to be as thorough as possible and it will likely be a very long post: Toast has been showing symptoms of MBD for a little over a month now. It started with slacking his arm under himself after he’d get picked up and put back down, but now he does it in his tank and will walk on his wrists occasionally, or he’ll just relax into a position with his arm straightened by his side. He can still run and will usually correct his feet into a normal position if nudged a bit, but I’m really at a loss for what could be causing this. After a vet visit we have him on a liquid calcium supplement and I’ve been better about dusting his food with Repti Calcium (without D3). I was admittedly bad about the calcium supplements for a couple of weeks, but I don’t know if that’s enough to start MBD. It’s been 2 weeks since we started him on his supplements and it’s either the same or gotten slightly worse. I understand that it can take time to improve, but I want to make sure I’m doing everything I can to correct it.
Okay, on to the bulk of the post… let’s start with tank specs.
Temperatures: The hot side ranges from 115-103 degrees Fahrenheit. The cool side is 80-77. I take my temperatures regularly with a heat gun from Home Depot.
Tank: 20 gallons (I actually have a 40 gallon tank unopened in my room at the moment— I got it in a couple of days ago and just need to purchase materials for it before moving him) I don’t use the screen at the top at all anymore, since there are no other animals or people in the house I’m worried about getting into the tank.
UVB: Zoo Med Reptisun 10.0 UVB T5 HO Reptile Terrarium, 24-watt bulb. The hood that it’s in is reflective. At our vet visit 2 weeks ago, they tested the bulb and told us it’s working great.
Heat: Repti Basking Spot Lamp 75w, white bulb.
Substrate: Ceramic tiles.
In the tank: I have a rock on the hot side and a rock on the cool side. A little fake plant I’m probably going to replace when I move him since he can’t really climb on it like he did when he was tiny. You’ll notice I also have a little dish in the tank— I use that for salads and discoid roaches and offer water outside the tank to prevent the humidity from rising.
Next, I’ll go over his diet:
As I mentioned I offer water daily, sometimes multiple times a day, outside of the tank. He is usually receptive to gently tapping a water dish.
He eats mainly crickets, 2-3 times a day, but I try to mix it up. He’ll eat discoid roaches, horn worms, and meal worms occasionally. I was very gingerly about the meal worms at first, but after my husband accidentally fed him quite a few and he had no problems passing stool afterwards, I’ve been a little more relaxed about them. He goes crazy for them so it’s hard to resist.
For greens, he doesn’t really seem interested in anything but collared greens yet. I’ve tried a very long list of vegetables and other leaves. Even then he isn’t great about eating them— maybe every few days he’ll munch on one or two, and he tends to favor the crunchy dried up ones. Not very nutritional, Toast…
For the record, we did bring a stool sample to check for parasites during the vet visit and it came back negative.
As I mentioned in the summary at the beginning, the main concern arises with the way he’s walking and resting. He’s lightning fast and a great runner when hunting crickets during feeding time, but he will often slack his wrist or arms. Since he walks on them normally a lot I’m hopeful this isn’t a major issue and can be worked out, but I feel like there’s still a lot I don’t know and that it’s really tough to find a good reptile vet. I’m doing everything instructed by the vet (even let up on the hornworms a lot because I was told they might be bad for calcium absorption) but I really wanted a second opinion from the forum. Thank you all so much for reading all of this.
Here are some pictures of him and the tank. I didn’t have any pictures or videos of him on his wrist and I didn’t want to bother him too much, but there is a picture of him after I picked him up and set him down on my hand.
