Meet Spike and Me

[goldenspike]

Hi! I'm not new to beardies, but I'm new to the site. My gal's 2 1/2 yrs old, her name is Spike, and after reading for a while on the board I've found she's not the only one with that name! She just got a new 55 gallon tank. She's actually a 4th grade class pet. The kids absolutely love her, and she teaches them all about responsibility and how to care for a reptile. She loves interacting with the kids and is very gentle; she goes out to recess and sits in the sun, loves attaching herself to somebody's shirt while they're reading to her, gets washed dandilions and worms found by the students every morning, and she's great motivation for good behavior. The kids earn alone time with her. It's interesting how some kids who won't open up to adults will open up to Spike. I'll post pictures of her working her magic later. Anyway, I'm glad to have found this bb. I've spent hours already just reading posts. Does anybody else have their dragons as class pets???

 

[Bianca]

Hi and welcome to the forum :wave: I think that's a wonderful idea to have her as a class pet, beardies are very social and she must love the attention. Just as a note, it is usually not recommended to feed worms from the outside, do you know what kind of worms they are? They also need to be dusted with calcium and vitamins regularly, with calcium 3 times/week and vitamins once/week. If you like, tell us about the set up that you have for her

 

[goldenspike]

Hi Bianca,
Thanks so much for your warm welcome! I'm actually thinking today that Spike's a he, as he does the head bobbing thing quite a bit, though I can't really see any bumps when I lift his tail. Anyway, his regular diet is a veggie salad of mustard greens, kale, spring greens, etc, and mostly crickets and mealworms. They do get dusted once a week. He eats the crickets and mealworms in a separate tank to keep him from ingesting sand. The kids bring in dandilion leaves for him too, and in the spring, they bring in earthworms from the playground out back where I know for a fact they don't spray.

He's in a 55 gallon tank with a hinged wire top. I have 2 18" Zoo Med® ReptiSun 10.0 lights spread across the back half, with a basking light and hammock in the right corner over his big rock arch. All three lights are on timers and go off at night. The basking rock is about 12" from the top of the tank. It gets to 105 degrees on that side, but the rock's long, so he can move over to the left if he'd like to cool off a bit. He can also go under the basking rock and dig in the 2" of sand if he feels he's getting a bit too much UVB but still wants to be warm. There's a low heat pad under the tank on that side. He also goes over to the cool side where we have a volcano set up that he climbs on or inside of. It actually can spew out cool mist, but we only turn it on for about 2 minutes a day. It's so amazingly dry here that it doesn't affect the humidity in the tank after those 2 minutes. He could also dig in the sand there, where it isn't so warm and he's further away from the UVB rays.
I need to post a picture of the whole thing. I teach Utah geology and rocks to 4th graders. The background looks like southern Utah, the sand is red Jurassic sand (very fine, dust free, made for sandboxes) and the rocks are mostly sandstone, with a few igneous rocks in there too. The only thing that isn't native to Utah is Spike! I'll try to get a shot of it tomorrow. I'm trying to decide if I want to put a big peice of driftwood in there too, or if I should leave more open space for him to run around. Any suggestions?