About

Welcome to ReptileCareGuide

ReptileCareGuide provides beginner-friendly guides for bearded dragons, reptile habitats, feeder insects and responsible long-term pet care.

We publish clear, practical English guides based on responsible care, reliable sources and reader safety.

How this site is produced

  • This site is run by two people, not a newsroom. There is no staff of writers.
  • AI tools are used for research and for drafting. Every article is checked before it goes up: each figure is traced back to its original source — government agencies, manufacturers, veterinary and medical references, company filings — and those sources are linked in the article so you can check them yourself.
  • We do not write about experiences we have not had. Where an article makes a judgement call, it is written as a judgement, with the evidence beside it.
  • Prices, specifications and rules change. Each article states the date its figures were checked.
  • Found an error? Write to deh6675@gmail.com. Corrections are made on the page itself, and the page says that it was corrected.

Editorial approach

  • Practical information for real readers
  • Reliable and preferably primary sources
  • Clear separation of facts, opinion and uncertainty
  • Corrections and updates when needed
  • Advertising and affiliate disclosures

ReptileCareGuide is independently published at reptilecareguide.blogspot.com.

Start Here: Bearded Dragon Care

Begin with safe habitat and UVB setup, then use the health audit and troubleshooting guides.

Care guides support responsible husbandry but do not replace an experienced reptile veterinarian.

Editorial and Review Policy

We prioritize helpful, original guidance written for readers. Time-sensitive facts are checked against official or primary sources whenever available, and confirmed information is clearly separated from estimates, opinions and unverified claims.

  • Dates, prices, specifications, measurements and other numbers include their reference date, unit and relevant conditions.
  • Practical guides should include reproducible steps, calculations, comparisons, screenshots or checklists when they materially help the reader.
  • Articles display an Updated or Last reviewed note only after a meaningful factual review or substantive revision. Dates are not changed merely to make older content appear new.
  • Corrections and important new information are added to the existing article when that better serves readers than publishing a duplicate.
  • Images must have a verified license or official usage permission, a descriptive ALT text and a useful caption.

Readers may use the Contact page to report a possible error or outdated source.

Editorial standards

Animal-care guidance is checked against veterinary manuals, qualified veterinary sources or established husbandry references. General care information does not replace diagnosis or treatment by a reptile or exotic-animal veterinarian. Product instructions and individual veterinary advice take priority. Material errors are corrected promptly, and images include license attribution.

Last policy review: August 26, 2026.

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Popular posts from this blog

Why Do Kenyan Sand Boas Need a Heat Lamp, Not a Heat Mat? The First-60-Days Mistake Beginners Make

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Kenyan sand boas need an overhead halogen heat bulb rather than the under-tank heat mat that works for most other beginner snakes: both of the species-specific care sheets that actually cover Eryx colubrinus list overhead halogen as the heat source and neither lists a heat mat. But the device is only half the answer, and the half most setup advice gets wrong. The published veterinary cases do not blame heat mats as a category — they blame direct, unregulated access to a heat source , which means a bulb hung where a snake can reach it is not automatically safe either. What follows takes the six things new keepers most often believe about heating this species in its first 60 days and checks each one against the care sheets and against clinical reports of reptile burns. The measurable targets are collected in a table near the end. Eryx colubrinus loveridgei, the Kenyan sand boa, photographed at Osaka Tennoji Zoo, Japan. Credit: OpenCage, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 . Source: W...
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The Rosy Boa Overfeeding Mistake: Why a Weekly Feeding Schedule Is Too Much in the First 60 Days

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The common belief, repeated across a lot of general snake-care advice: feed your pet snake once a week, maybe once every ten days once it's an adult. For a corn snake or a ball python, that's a reasonable starting point. For a rosy boa — one of the most beginner-friendly, docile snakes in the US pet trade, and a species increasingly recommended as a bearded-dragon alternative — a weekly schedule is overfeeding, and the fat that builds up in the first 60 days is hard to notice until it's already a problem. A rosy boa (Lichanura trivirgata) photographed in Joshua Tree National Park. Photo by Robb Hannawacker, National Park Service — U.S. federal government work, public domain / CC BY 2.0. Original file and license . Case A: the adult still eating every seven days Most widely shared snake-feeding guidelines were written with colubrids in mind — corn snakes, kingsnakes, garter snakes — species that are more active, burn through energy faster, and come from habitats with...
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The Twice-Daily Misting Mistake: Why Green Anoles Dehydrate in the First 60 Days

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Green anoles show up at big-box pet stores for eight to fifteen dollars, usually sitting next to bearded dragons and leopard geckos as if they belong in the same starter-reptile category. They don't. A bearded dragon drinks from a bowl and tolerates a dry cage for days. A green anole ( Anolis carolinensis ) often won't drink from standing water at all, and a cage that's allowed to dry out between cleanings can desiccate a healthy anole within the first two weeks. The failure point for new keepers isn't feeding or temperature — it's water delivery, and specifically the habit of treating misting as optional. Key takeaways Green anoles are adapted to drink moving water droplets (dew and rain), not still water in a bowl — a cage misted once a day or less is the most common first-60-days killer. Care-sheet consensus calls for misting twice daily, with daytime humidity around 60–70% and a nighttime rise toward 90% in a properly closed enclosure. A screen-topped encl...
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California Kingsnake Care for Beginners: Setup, Temps & Feeding

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Key takeaway: The California kingsnake is one of the most forgiving snakes a beginner can keep, but it has two rules that can't be bent. It must live alone, because kingsnakes eat other snakes, and its enclosure must be escape-proof. Get those right, add a thermostat-controlled warm-to-cool gradient and a weekly-to-biweekly feeding routine, and most of the hard work is done. This DailyHub Network editors' guide pulls together published husbandry numbers from a veterinary information sheet, a herpetological society care guide, a zoo species profile, and the Merck Veterinary Manual. Where those sources disagree, the ranges are shown side by side so you can see where the consensus sits. California kingsnake ( Lampropeltis californiae ), banded phase. Photo by 5snake5, released under CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication). Original file page , Wikimedia Commons. Every published number, in one table The table below lists the ranges published by each source. Air and surface temp...
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Bearded Dragon Care Checklist: UVB, Heat, Humidity and Calcium

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Central bearded dragon ( Pogona vitticeps ). Photo by Cliff from Arlington, Virginia, USA, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons. Used without modification. Updated September 22, 2026. Every figure on this page was read that day from the sources listed at the bottom. Each one is given with its unit, and with the species it was actually published for. A care checklist is worth exactly what its numbers are worth. "Provide UVB" is not a checklist item, because there is no way to fail it and know you failed it. "10 percent UVB tube, sited so the dragon's back sits about a foot beneath it, with the replacement date written on the tube in marker" is a checklist item. The four familiar headings below have been turned into measurements: what to read, what the reading is standing guard over, and how often it has to be read again. Almost every beginner problem in the first two months is one of these numbers drifting quietly while the tank still looks fine. What each re...
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Red-Eared Slider Turtle Care for Beginners: What That Cheap Starter Turtle Actually Costs You Over 20+ Years

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Every summer, small quarter-sized turtles change hands at state fairs, flea markets, and online marketplaces for a few dollars apiece. Almost all of them are red-eared sliders ( Trachemys scripta elegans ) — and almost all of that trade is illegal. Federal regulators banned the commercial sale of turtles under four inches back in 1975 specifically because of animals like these, yet a CDC-affiliated review of outbreaks decades later found small sliders are still, in the researchers' own words, "readily acquired through multiple venues," including flea markets, online retailers, and souvenir shops. If you're weighing one of these turtles as an easy starter pet, the honest starting point isn't the checkout counter — it's understanding that the animal fitting in your palm at hatchling size will need a real aquatic setup, real filtration, and two to four decades of care to stay healthy. That gap between the cheap impulse buy and the actua...
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The Goldfish Mistake: Why Garter Snakes Fail in the First 60 Days

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Garter snakes get recommended to first-time keepers more than almost any other species, usually with the same pitch: hardy, small, native, and "they'll even eat fish, so feeding is easy." That last part is where a large share of new keepers go wrong. Because garter snakes really are natural fish-eaters, beginners reasonably default to a diet of feeder goldfish or minnows from the pet store — and within a matter of weeks, some of those snakes start showing head tremors, loss of balance, and a backward-arching neck that has nothing to do with a bad enclosure and everything to do with what's on the menu. A common garter snake (Thamnophis sirtalis). Photo: Brian Gratwicke, via Wikimedia Commons , licensed CC BY 2.0 . The one number: 25% of the diet Every figure in this guide hangs off a single threshold: 25%. That is the share of a reptile’s diet at which the Merck Veterinary Manual’s own feeding table stops treating frozen, thawed fish as a garnish and starts ca...
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African Fat-Tailed Gecko: Where Beginners Fail in the First 60 Days (With Target Numbers)

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Published October 4, 2026. This guide covers the most common first-60-day mistakes with African fat-tailed geckos, and every target value was checked against the sources listed at the end. African fat-tailed gecko (Hemitheconyx caudicinctus). Photo credit: Hexasoft, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0. African fat-tailed geckos are often sold as "the leopard gecko alternative," and that label is exactly where many new keepers go wrong. The two species look alike and both live on the ground, but a fat-tail set up like a leopard gecko tends to run into the same few problems in the first two months: stuck shed, a heat setup nobody has actually measured, feeding that goes off track, and illness that arrived with the animal. This article skips the species background and goes straight to those failure points, with numbers you can check with a thermometer, a hygrometer and a kitchen scale. "A fat-tail is just a leopard gecko with a thicker tail" The situation: Withi...
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