Your Leopard Gecko: Habitat

Making it look good

A lot of leopard gecko owners adopt a simple approach to their leopard geckos habitat: just a tank; a paper towel substrate; a couple of food and water bowls, and a couple of basic hide boxes. While there’s nothing wrong with this setup, and a leo living in that kind of environment will be perfectly happy and healthy, there are a world of others features you can include in the habitat to make things more interesting both for you and for your pet.

Here are some features you can add to your leo’s habitat to enhance how it looks:

• A ‘Peek-A-View’ Burrow. This is a product made by the company T-Rex. It’s a foam burrow – a tunnel with entry and exit holes long enough that it has a big middle chamber your leo can hide in. You can add water to the middle chamber to make it a humid environment, which is perfect for helping your leopard gecko to shed. Best of all though, the tunnel is cutaway at the front, meaning that you can still watch and observe your leo while it’s hiding in it.
• Plants – real or fake. Something green makes your leo’s habitat look a lot nicer and more natural. Plastic plants are an option, and certainly a low-maintenance one. If you want to use real plants then good options are snake plants (Sansevieria trifasciata), pony-tailed palms (Beaucarnea recurvata) and dwarf cow-tongues (Gasteria sp.). There are two problems with using real plants however, and they are: 1) a real plant in the tank, unless the tank is very well ventilated, may raise the humidity beyond where it should be for an ‘arid’ environment, and 2) it’s impossible to keep a plant alive indoors without a full-spectrum grow light placed very close to it, and balancing that against your leo’s light needs means an additional headache.
• Rocks.  The leopard gecko’s habitat in the wild is typically a lot more rocky than it is sandy, so a few big rocks in your leo’s tank will make it feel right at home. Pick some interesting, colorful specimens and they’ll look good at well. Combining rocks with a slate tile substrate, some sand, and some plants gives a nice-looking overall effect.
• A tank background. With most reptile tanks you can see right through them to the wall of your house on the other side. That’s a pity, because it’s easy to change the view for something more natural looking. There are two options here: simply stick a 2-D picture onto the outside of the rear wall of the tank, or buy (or make) a 3-D ‘rock wall’ background that goes on the inside back wall of the tank (a search of the internet will give you many of these to choose from). Many of the 3-D type have the added advantage of giving your leo something to climb on.

So do yourself and your leo a favor and really make him feel at home.