new here w. first dragon

[sizaclan]

Hello fellow dragon owners! I have been readinf the forums here for a few weeks now. Finally got our set up earlier in the week and we got our dragon today. He/she is about 7 inches long, very allert and friendly. I have the pen plex glass terranium with zoo med dome basking light and reptisun 10 for UVB. His home looks rather bare right now, using news papers untill I get some tile, and 2 sets of unterlocking stones to make him a basking area with hide away uner it. Then of course the food/water dishes. We have no pet stores in my town so we went 45 min today to get him and they didnt have a big selection of items to decorate with. Will order some items on-line. He has bee home about 2 hours and had 2 meal worms and already ate a bowl of greens. I got 2 dozen crickets and 2 dozen meal works for now along with collard greens, and a sample pack of zoo med food. There are juvi pellets, can of crickets, can of fruit, repti vite, the powder to dust crickets and a few other things in the sample pack.
Do you guys use the pellets or do you just feed live food & greens?
Also any easy way to tell the difference between male/female?
After going to 5 local (with in 45 min) pet shops this was the cleanest, most friendly/helpfull. Others were smelly, dirty and clearly they just wanted to make a sale. This pet shop I didnt feel any pressue and felt they they actually cared for the animals, after talking w/ them for awhile I forgot to ask if they knew if it was male or female.
We have named him/her Chaos though so that will work for either gender.
Looking forward to learning more and hopeully becoming an active membe of this group!
Jess in PA
mom of
Chaos- new beardie kid
and 4 human kids!

 

[HaleyMaree]

Hi! And welcome to the site.

A few adjustments you may wanna make: Mealworms, defintely a no go. They have hard shells that are hard for beardies to digest. Plus they don't have enough nutrients for your beardie.

The fruit if it is citrus is not something that you want to feed often. Veggies are really good, usually the darker the better. Stay away from lettuce, as it can get stuck in the beardies throat and has other complications.

Your temps should be around 100-110 on the hotside of the tank ( basking area) and 80- 90 on the cool side.

Some people use pellets, I prefer and my dragon prefer the veggies and live feeders.

Right now your beardie is most likely to young to tell if it is a male or female, but maybe....

If you go on the forum breeding and post "help sexing my beardie" and post a pic or to of the vent area ( where they go to the bathroom) and have the tail up at a angle then they can help you detirmine.

Once again hoped i helped!

Click on my username if you want to find out more about me! And if you want visit my dragons thread ( at photo expressions) and its under "finnally, Pictures of Puff.

Welcome! The people on here on great!

~Haley

 

[GlueStick]

Welcome to the site!

Pellets may be used over vegetables (and soak the pellets with water before serving). Pellets are meant to put a boost in your dragon's growth, but is by no means necessary to offer. Dark leafy greens are best (kale, mustard greens, dandelion greens, collard greens, escarole, etc) Try using beautifuldragons.com/Nutrition (make sure you capitalize the N in 'nutrition') as a guideline for feeding.

Right now, being that it sounds as if he is 7inches and certainly under a year old, most of his diet will be protein-based (about 75% of his diet should be made up of insects until he is about 1yr-1.5yrs of age, where it will then flip flop and 75% will be vegetable based). So what does that mean? LOTS of crickets XD I see that you are using the canned crickets. Is he eating them? Most prefer live. Young bearded dragons can eat up to 100 crickets a day, so you have to be willing to give into the fact that crickets become your second 'pet,' haha. My female at that age ate about 40-60 a day and my male, 70-90 a day. Make sure you dust the crickets with calcium/d3 apprx. 4-5xs a week with multivitamins 1-2xs a week. I usually recommend using the RepCal brandname for calcium/d3 and multivitamin supplementation.

Mealworms are an iffy right now. They honestly have little to no nutritional value and are difficult to digest because of their hard chitin shell and the dragons' already very narrow intestinal tract. You can of course feed them when he is a bit older and larger. Other worms that are great to feed are reptiworms/phoenix worms, waxworms (treat only- they sell these at pet stores), butterworms, and superworms (when he is an adult).

As for the temperatures... as Haley mentioned, keep the basking between 100-110, or preferably, 105-110 for juveniles. The cool side however should not exceed 86F and not be lower than 80F - you want a variation for thermoregulation so they have more options for temperature range. Make sure that you use digital thermometers.

Off to class now. I'm sure I missed something, but I am in a rush. Now all you have to do is a post pictures of the little guy/gal! (use photobucket and copy and paste the IMG code)

-Glue

 

[tgolden]

Hello and welcome !!!!!!!!!!!!!