Baaabbbbyyyy!

[ike]

Okay - you know how I mentioned I found some eggshells from my longtailed grass lizards 5 or 6 days ago? Guess what I found in the tank last night? This is a 40 gallon heavily planted tank and this little guy is impossibly, incredibly, unbelievably tiny! I found him hiding in the leaves of the croton; didn't know what it was at first (just looked like a curled up brown thread). Managed to catch him (using a tea strainer, LOL!) and have him in his own setup right now.
Here is a cloesup of Peewee:



Now here he is with a penny in the bottom of the pic so you can see how small he is!



Here's the setup I presently have him in...sort of a critter keeper with moist substrate, a hide and some small fake plants. Reptiglo 2.0 full spectrum, heat light and I mist it down as well.



Now I need help!

1) Feeding this little guy: I called everywhere last night trying to find pinheads or wingless fruit flies. They can order them, but I won't get them until Thursday! Peewee and I took a trip into our local herp store, the Vivarium, and the wonderful guy there searched through bins and bins of crickets until he found three really small ones (he, too, was a bit freaked out by the tininess of the baby). We also pulled out a couple of little mealworms. Hopefully this will keep him going until the fruit flies come in on Thursday. I also found a couple of small seed moths and a very small grasshopper that I put in with him. I was hoping for aphids, but for the first time ever, my roses are aphid free, of course. Any other suggestions?

2) Do hatchlings require the same heat and humidity as adults, or higher? (I can find nothing online about the young of this type of lizard).

3) Any suggestions or help will be greatly appreciated! As you can tell, I'm a bit out of my depth with hatchlings!

[beckdg]

i am not sure honestly and i'm having a hard time locating an answer also. i'd say you were doing a great job with the original setup and keep doing what you do. as far as i see it though there's obviously a few things to consider. seems like you got pretty much all of them down. one thing i will mention is that i would take special care not to let night drops approach minimum temps since the little guy's so tiny. also as with any other herp the supplements should increase in frequency. i am sure you know these things but figured just in case. also if there's a way you can direct the heat on one side more than the other that might be a good idea. like maybe a clamp lamp with a light or heat emitter aimed at a side instead of the top or bottom. that should help with a gradient, but i don't know if they'll use it that young. you'd have to pay attention and decide for yourself.

[ike]

Thanks for all of your suggestions! Besides the food issue (I'm pretty sure that he did eat something yesterday) I'm having a bit of trouble keeping the daytime temps high enough. Although I have a basking light, the Critter Keeper's lid is plastic, so I have to be careful with that. I'm going to try to get a small wire mesh lid today or perhaps make my own if necessary. I revamped his digs last night with lots of fake plants, climbs, a good hide in the "cooler" end (where the full spectrum is), etc. This box also has a lid with a small door in it for my access. He's very agile!
I'm off to find some more seed moths ("luckily" we sometimes have a problem with them here as I also keep birds). Wish those fruit flies could have arrived faster than tomorrow. Thanks again, and if you come across anything else, let me know.

[beckdg]

if you have an extra uth laying around you can put one under it with a towel on top to keep it from getting too hot. BE VERY CAREFUL WITH THAT THOUGH. a corded lamp dimmer should help keep that at a low enough temp so you don't start a fire. i would put it on some egg crate or something with ventilation holes for safety also. right now i have 2 land hermit crabs in a critter keeper 1 gallon. i know it's small, but it's temporary. i keep them between 70f-75f by keeping the enclosure about 6" away from the outside of my clamp lamp on top of pj's cage. the clamp lamp in question holds a 100 watt ceramic heat emitter. it works well. critter keepers also tend to have holes (slits) in the lids. if you were able to cover that in a way that's safe that should help. the first thing that comes to mind is aluminum foil over about 2/3 of the top. might also be a good idea to use a rope heater (like a substrate heater) around the lower part of the cage. you can use old rags or kitchen towels to shield the plastic from the heat so the little guy don't get burned. for a more permanent solution you can put it on some wax paper and spray gs around it and wrap a rope heater in that while it's drying. if it is fairly new and has no scratches it might not be too hard to remove when you're done also. idk about getting your rope heater out though. another solution is to put the critter keeper on a metal wire shelf and place a clamp lamp underneath.

i hope this sparks a thought at least.

you can also break up one of the various "worms" or mealies into smaller pieces for him to eat for now. not much nutrition, but it should fatten him up a bit... fat babies are healthy babies imo.

[froggsong]

if you have a compost bin or some old fruit, collect some FFs with a net (if you use old fruit, put it somewhere warm... you might attract some with some beer or wine or even fruit juice as well). you can also collect some springtails from your garden soil or potted plants, some tiny rollie pollies, tiny worms (they'll be white or clear, you can attract them with something actively fermenting), tiny snail (preferably baby snails rather than ones that stay little, as their shells will be thinner), baby slugs (can sometimes be found hanging out on mama slug. lizards LOVE slugs, so you may want to culture some), drain flies (if you ever see any) would be the perfect size... basically anything you can find that is smaller than it's head, as long as you don't use pestisides. with crawlies that small, you shouldn't have to worry too much about whether you neighbors use pestisides, you'd have to worry more about the fliers. if you are worried about potential parasites, you can feed the worm, slugs, snails, and rollie pollies yellow cornmeal until they poop yellow (or you can see yellow throgh the worms). IMO, even though your feeders will be in tomorrow, you should still catch some of these critters and culture them, since it offers a more varried diet and the lizards would be eating them in the wild. you can feed them to the adults too. you might also consider some feeder roaches, as the babies are very small and there is very little risk of them living outside of thier container. just don't grab any ants.

[ike]

Thanks for all of the food suggestions! I found some nice aphids today and a couple of seed moths, but will definitely start hunting around for the others. I did find an eensy weensy poop on his rock, so he must have eaten! I did try cut up mealie, beckdg, but he wouldn't touch them (picky boy).


As far as the heat thing, I have a healthy respect (read: am totally paranoid) about any kind of possible fire hazard, so I did a tour of the petshops today but couldn't find anything like a wire mesh lid for the Critter Keeper. I went ahead and cut a section out of the lid I had and replaced it with heavy galvanized mesh (from an old partial cover). The plastic around it doesn't get hot now with my small heatlamp and everything seems good.
You can see that I've fixed up his habitat big time as well:



Again, thank you so much for all of the help both of you! I don't feel quite as freaked out as I was when I first found him!

It keeps the internal temp good and Peewee can bask!



Here's another cutesy pic:
(That's a small juice cap next to him, believe it or not!)

[froggsong]

i've got some eensy pacific tree frogs that i've raised from tads and they are eating super tiny stuff too. one of them is almost the size of my thumbnail now.

your cage looks really nice! if you do end up with any melt from the light, screen lids are super easy to make, and i can easily walk you through it.

[beckdg]

soda cap??? that's an olympic swimming pool! he'd be lapping up his luxury if he couldn't drown in it... rofl. that is the most awesome viv i've ever seen. i'm into computers so small is big!

[ike]

He hasn't been swimming any laps yet, LOL! I just put a very small amount of water in the cap, a few drops, really. I spray the plants down a lot, though.
I found out that my large planter box outside is a treasure trove for detritis bugs...pillbugs, springtails, etc., and others not so helpful. I was able to pick through and find some really small pillbugs and also grabbed a couple of springtails. The fruit flies are due in today.
Thanks for the compliments on his habitat. I think that's what I enjoy the most - designing little habitats...

And to sign off for now, I'll leave you with this:

[beckdg]

now all you need is a crib mobile with 4 little froggies for him... lol.