New to Bearded dragons, adpoted a 1-1/2 year old..

[Frito]

Hello all.

I will start off by saying that I'm not new to raising reptiles but all of the ones i have owned or do own are Iguanas. i've read a lot about Bearded Dragons and recently got the opertunity to adopt a 1-1/2 year hold Male BD from a young boy that got bored of it.

Background on the BD that i could find out from the pervious owners was pretty minimal but he has always been healthy, alert and friendly according to them but he did escape once in the spring and was outdoors for a few weeks before they found him i was told.

anyways he looked healthy to me when i visited them but was definitely under fed, stomach was skinny for a BD of his size and as they gave me his cage and everything that they had for him with him they appeared to just be feeding him very little, what they gave me was a cricket container that had one cricket in it and a small tub of small meal worms (yes i read they are bad for them and i am not feeding him the meal worms)

so the ride home was kind of stressful for him i'm sure. i put him in a 10 gal terrarium i had so i could keep him on the passenger seat of my truck for the ride home (1 hour drive) he was constantly clawing at the cage etc.

so got him home and i left him in the 10 gal so i could clean and fix some minor issues with his old wood cage they gave me (replaced the plastic front with glass because it was scratched, cut the top open more and screened it with chicken wire so the new MVB bulb would penetrate into the cage real well.

I bought a Powersun 100 watt MVB for him because they had been using a crappy Exo-terra 10.0 compact FB that i know is no good plus it looked very old even though they claimed it was not but thats besides the point.

so anyways got him all setup yesterday and he was very active and basking under the MVB (i had it raised up real high for break in i know they output more UVB when new and need to be broken in before moved closer) he ate a ton of crickets yesterday and had a very watery bowl movement that did not look normal, the feces looked orange but the urates were white as normal. this concerned me but from what i read it could have just been his diet that caused it and to see if it changes with a change in diet.

so today i get up in the morning and the lights for him and my iguana come on (have them both running on the same timer on a 12/12 cycle) last night he had dug a hole in the sand in the corner of the cage and slept there (yes i read sand is bad for them but more specifically smaller dragons, i figured if hes been in sand for this long he must be used to it and its ok for him) so today he stays in that corner pretty much all day and not moving around very often and usually has his eyes closed, ate 1 cricket in the morning when it went in front of him but that was it never ate another one and never bothered to even go to the side of the cage with the water bowl and collard greens i put in there for him this morning. spend 90% of the day with his eyes closed and doing nothing. the good news is he had two bowl movements today and both looked normal, no more orange color, just brown with a little green and white urates.

is he stressed out or do you guys think i should cut off the MVB bulb as its putting out to much UV for him?

here is photos of him and his setup taken yesterday

and this is him today, he has moved out of the corner he dug but is still pretty much not doing anything

maybe i'm jumping the gun here i'm not sure, you think i should just give him some time to adjust to the new home and he will get back to normal and is just stressed out from the trip and the new home?

 

[techdave]

Welcome It normally takes a couple of weeks for a beardie to adjust to it's new home. The eyes being closed might be because they were damged with the old light.I don't know anything about the MVB's though, sorry. With crickets, you don't want to leave them in the viv with the beardie, because they could eat the toes and eyelids and such off your beardie when he's sleeping. You want to get a separate feeding cage for him. What are your temps? What are you measuring it with? It should be about 100-105 ish in the basking area and about 80 in the cool end. Did you name him yet?

 

[Frito]

His previous owner named him spike, good call on removing the crickets from his cage. will do that right away. i got some pheonix worms coming this week so when i get them i'm going to switch to feeding him that as i read that is more healthy for them (more calcium)

temps are fine daytime temps are 80-85 on the cool end and 100-105 at the basking spot at night i keep the room around 75 because that's a good happy median for both him and my iguana

for the cool end i have a flukers digital thermometer/hydrometer and for the basking spot I'm using a zilla digital probe thermometer, i use the same setup in my iguana's cage without issues.

I figured it probably just stress from the move and will definitely feed him crickets in a 10 gal terrarium i have for now thanks for the advice

today i'm also going to keep the MVB bulb off and see if he acts differently, yesterday i switched it over to my iguana's cage for a bit and my iguana acted real positively to the light so its definately putting off UVB but the question is how much

 

[Frito]

Well i think i've figured out at least some of the reason why hes acting this way, he is starting to shed as of today and from what i read its pretty normal for them to eat less during this period and not uncommon for them to rub their head on objects etc and he has rubbed his head on the cage wall a few times today.

otherwise he did eat some today and is in general being more active and basking as of this afternoon so that is a good sign.

any other recommendations are welcome, i just want to make sure the little guy is ok because in my personal opinion while the home he came from was not terrible he was not take care of 100% correctly from what i saw and can tell (bad UVB light, lights mounted inside the cage and far to close to him, not fed much of anything nutritional etc. no water dishes in the cage when i got there)

he does not appear to have MBD to me so that is good and his body mass looks normal now where as when i got him he was skinny so i think he is doing better so far.

 

[mickeysmomma]

I adopted mine about 8 months ago, and she was also on sand. I thought it would be okay to leave her in it. Took her in for her very first vet check up, and the vet said get rid of the sand. She had sand in her belly, and had paracites from it.

 

[Frito]

I adopted mine about 8 months ago, and she was also on sand. I thought it would be okay to leave her in it. Took her in for her very first vet check up, and the vet said get rid of the sand. She had sand in her belly, and had paracites from it.

Yeah i know i should remove it and it was a mistake to put it back in and should have changed the substrate when i had the chance, i'm going to leave it be for a week or two till he is more adjusted to his new home and then i will clean it out and probably go get some granite patterned linoleum or something similar so its easy to clean the bottom like i did in my iguana's cage

 

[techdave]

Go with tile. Easy to clean and will also help to keep the nails trimmed back.

 

[Frito]

Go with tile. Easy to clean and will also help to keep the nails trimmed back.

i never thought about that, tile would keep the claws duller wouldn't it.

all in all though his claws are nothing compared to an iguana's claws, they are like razors and i'm used to those

 

[Frito]

update time.

this week he has been eating very little crickets or collard greens.

I ordered some Phoenix worms for him and got them on Thursday and he absolutely love them and will pretty much eat as many as i can give him but otherwise forget about it he wont eat much.

what concerns me now though more than anything is he has yet to defecate in going on 5 days now, yes i know the sand needs to go and i plan on doing that this weekend because i did not have time during the week to do it due to work.

i have not been too alarmed overall this week because he moves around very well and is very active and basks all day long and now that i have a food he likes to feed him he readily eats but tonight when he was eating i noticed the back of his belly is getting very large when he stands up on all 4's and want everyone's opinion on this

here is a crappy cell phone picture of him when i noticed it today (he was eating some phoenix worms at the time i saw it

otherwise when he is normally on the ground or on his log or rock he looks normal body size wise an improvement over how he looked when i got him his side scales were wrinkled indicating being malnourished

tomorrow morning i'm going to give him a bath to hopefully help him dedicate and clean him and also get rid of the sand and put in newspaper to take the impaction issues out of the equation for the future

 

[Frito]

well good news after eating a couple dozen phoenix worms this morning Spike took a big dump and he also dropped a seminal plug so that might explain why he's been backed up this week if it was blocking his vent.

hopefully he gets more hungry and starts eating his greens because phoenix worms are expensive but he never turns them down