I have always waned a water dragon, and I completly fell for them when I saw a baby in petco, the tiniest little thing. I have always wanted to get one, and have decided that I want one for my birthday. of course, I need to decide if they are right for me first. I have a bearded dragon already named Sid, so am not completely new to reptiles. I have enough room for a 4' long by 2'deep by 4' high enclosure, would that be enough? what do they eat? can they be handled? does anyone have pics of their custom made cages? how long do they live? can they live in screen cages? what should I use for substrate? can I use repti-carpet or bed a beast? I am planning to make a water area for half of the cage along with a small waterfall, and keep some live plants (like a ficus tree or 2, some philodendrons, some broms, and maybe a few flowering plants) and have a UVB strip light (reptiSUN 5.0) and a household heat bulb at the very top of the cage as a basking spot. could I keep some aquatic o semi aquatic plants int eh water area? I would make a moat of dead moss around the dish. thanks for any help!
hey well let me see if i can answer some of these for ya first of all yes that enclosure would be great for them as for food they will eat crickets,mealworms,superworms,small fish,pinky mice and some will eat green vegetables yes they can be handled but you will probably take a while to tame them they are rather jumpy at first no they cannot live in screen cages because they need high levels of humidity and that can only be achieved with a semi closed enclosure if you arent going to use live plants repti carpet if fine but bed-a-beast hold humidity well and you sure can keep live plants in their water area i will give you some pics in a minute i have to go take some new ones
this is now it used to be like this i just havent been able to build a custom enclosure cuz my room is taken up by the iguana enclosure im making this is that if you wanna see it
Im not sure if a 4x4x2 enclosure would be big enough. It might be if you have just one female since they are smaller but its still a little small. If you make them a bigger one when he/she is ful grown then that would probably be better. My cage is 6ft tall 4ft long and 2ft wide and has 2 female chinese water dragons in it. My baby australian water dragon is living in a 50gal and is very happy with it for now. If you want a baby one you should probably start out with a smaller cage like a tank so they dont get to stressed out. For food they eat a variety of insects. Mine are pretty picky though, they will like one thing for a month then hate it and I have to find something else they like. Mine usualy eat superworms, they never get sick of them. But with crickets sometimes they do, sometimes they dont. When they were younger they loved them but when they got bigger they wanted the supers and mealworms more. I always hand feed them everything, which makes them not so jumpy. Insted of hiding when I open the cage they pop their heads up looking for food. I deffinetly wouldnt put one in a screen cage, it would be really hard to keep up the humidity that they need. Heres a pic of my cage it looks a little different now, I took the shelfs out(they wernt workin out) and heres a pic of both of them together basking. The one on the top had a hard time at the petstore as you can see, they didnt have any humidity at all and she had old skin covering her whole body and lost all the spikes on her back, and a fingure probably from rough handling. If your going to have a big enclosure Id go with a MVB insted of a uvb tube. IMO they just work better. But if you go with the tubes you probably want to put more than one, like one at the top and one somewhere in the middle or on the side.
