My first reptile has arrived! šŸ„³ Help me fine-tune the basking spot/s?

from what i see I have a mix of bladder and pond snails. they have been in captivity for decades.

@adra how has your humidity been? any Nova updates?

Humidity has been holding pretty steady for the past week, with the warm side of the enclosure usually maintaining around 40-50%, and the cool side hovering right around the 60% mark (thatā€™s where the water bowl is, which seems to affect it pretty stronglyā€”when I took it out to clean, humidity dropped 5-10%). So the CHEs are doing a good job balancing out the ambient humidity. :slight_smile:

Iā€™m having a little more issue keeping temperatures steady between day and night, but Iā€™ve heard recommendations both for and against allowing a mild temperature drop at nightā€¦ I have a halogen flood bulb (80w) that heats during the day, then a CHE (100w) that replaces it at night. Thereā€™s also a secondary CHE (50w) that runs both day and night, to bring the temperatures up into the optimal range. The UV linear light doesnā€™t affect the temperature to any measurable extent, and switches off at night with the flood bulb. The cool side remains at 75-78F at all times, but the basking platform (which is around 96-104F during the day) drops by about 10F at night, and the rest of the warm side (which is 86-94F during the day) drops by 5-10F. from what Iā€™ve been able to gather, these are pretty good numbers, right? Should I change anything?

As for Nova, sheā€™s been exploring and climbing around, eating and digesting well, and generally being very good with short handling sessions. :slight_smile: She also likes to burrow in the substrate and rearrange her plants, lol. XD I found her like this one morning, and thought it was pretty amusing to see her in ā€œstealth modeā€:

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Too cute! Just caught my blood python in a similar pose, Nova and Mina are stealth twins. :joy:

(Canā€™t offer any advice on BTS husbandry, Iā€™m just here for the pictures of adorable baby potato lizard.)

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Where is she! Lol seriously I cannot find her! And when substrate do you use? Your setup looks very nice! :blush:

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Under the big leaf. Look for the STP eye stripe. :shushing_face:

The substrate is actually paper bedding normally sold for small mammals. I ran out of coco husk last time she peed and this was the best I had on hand, so now her enclosure looks like thereā€™s a blanket of snow in the jungle. :rofl: I intend to return to the coco husk, but this stuff has been serving us just fine for now, so I decided to hold off on changing it until she needs a cleaning.

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Ok there she! Lol! She really blends in! And yeah it does kinda look like snow! Lol! :blush:

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Wow, well spotted under there!

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Those temps are pretty good. My skink absolutely loves hotter temps so If you are able to raise the basking spot to 105-110 then you might see more basking behavior (if you donā€™t already). When I bumped up my basking spot my skink became a lot more active and inquisitive. One time my basking spot got up to 120 (I donā€™t know how) and it was like that for a couple of days and he seemed really happy and was basking a LOT. I think my skink is weird :sweat_smile:

My skink was in a very similar situation the other day. Yours looks a lot happier than mine though :rofl:

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