Reptiles

Before you get a reptile

• 🔌Set the enclosure up and run it for a week before the animal arrives, so you know the gradient holds. A thermostat is mandatory, not optional — unregulated heat mats cause serious burns.
• 🌡️Provide a temperature gradient rather than one temperature, so the animal can choose. Measure it with a probe or infrared gun, not by the dial on the device.
• ☀️Most diurnal species need UVB for vitamin D3 and calcium metabolism. Bulbs degrade long before they stop emitting visible light and need replacing every six to twelve months.
• 💦Humidity requirements differ enormously and are species-specific. A shedding problem is nearly always a humidity problem.
• ⏳Many species are long-lived: a bearded dragon reaches ten years, a ball python thirty, and a tortoise can outlive you by decades.
• 🧼Reptiles commonly carry salmonella without being ill themselves. Wash hands after handling and after anything that has been in the enclosure, keep all of it out of the kitchen sink, and think carefully about a reptile in a house with a child under five or anyone whose immune system is compromised.
• 📜Check the paperwork and the law before the animal. Several species listed here are licensed, prohibited or CITES-listed depending on where you are, and captive-bred provenance is worth asking about for its own sake as well as for the certificate.
• 🦴Metabolic bone disease is the classic avoidable illness, and it comes from too little calcium, too little UVB or both. It is largely irreversible once the bones have deformed, and it is entirely preventable with a dusted insect and a working bulb.
• 🏚️Buy the adult enclosure, not the hatchling one. Most of these animals multiply in length, and a vivarium bought for a twenty-centimetre juvenile is a second purchase inside two years.

General guidance, not veterinary advice. Anything about a specific animal is a question for a vet who has seen it.

Reptiles worth knowing about

A place to start rather than the whole list. Every name is a page.

• 🐆
  Leopard gecko

  The usual first reptile, and deservedly: small, ground-dwelling, tolerant of handling and content with a simple set-up. Still needs a thermostat, a calcium dish and live insects.

• 🐲
  Bearded dragon

  The most personable lizard commonly kept, eight to twelve years, and the one most often kept in too small a vivarium with too weak a UVB bulb. Omnivorous — insects when young, greens as an adult.

• 🐍
  Ball python

  Docile, manageable and thirty years or more, which is the number to sit with before buying. Famous for refusing food for weeks at a time, which is usually normal and occasionally not.

• 👅
  Blue-tongued skink

  A heavy-bodied, ground-dwelling omnivore with genuine personality and a taste for being handled once it knows you. Needs floor space rather than height, and a varied diet.

• 🐢
  Box turtle

  Named for the hinged shell it can close completely. Fifty years is unremarkable and past a hundred is documented, so this is an animal that gets written into a will.

• 👑
  California kingsnake

  Hardy, active and straightforward to keep — a good first snake, with the caveat that kingsnakes eat other snakes and must be housed strictly alone.

• 

  Heat, light, and why a heat mat is not a sun

  A reptile runs at the temperature you give it. Basking spots, thermal gradients, why UVB burns out before it stops glowing, and the thermostat that is not optional.

• 

  How to photograph your pet

  Light, height, focus and patience — what separates a good pet photo from a blurred one, and how to handle black cats, white dogs and animals that never sit still.

• 

  Heatstroke, and the first ten minutes

  Heatstroke kills quickly and is entirely preventable. Which animals are at risk, the signs, and the cooling that current evidence actually supports.

• 

  Adopting a rescue animal

  Rescue animals arrive without a history and settle on their own timetable. What decompression means, what the first three months look like, and what helps.

All 19 reptile breeds with photos

Every breed somebody has posted, A to Z.

• Ackie monitor3
• African fat-tailed gecko3
• Aldabra tortoise3
• Amazon tree boa2
• Argentine black and white tegu3
• Asian water monitor2
• Ball python3
• Bearded dragon3
• Black rat snake2
• Blood python2
• Blue-tongued skink5
• Boa constrictor3
• Box turtle3
• Brazilian rainbow boa3
• Brown anole2
• Bull snake2
• Burmese python2
• California kingsnake3
• Leopard gecko3