Nothing good ever starts with “I shouldn’t be doing this” or indeed “hold my beer”.
As a retired rugby player of some 30 years, there have been a lot of “hold my beer” moments. Not one of them ended, in what is traditionally known as – well.
Broken bones.
Lacerations.
Arrests.
Really bad Indian food.
And on one memorable occasion, pepper spray as seasoning – don’t ask.
So, two leopard geckos in a build together after every single person I’ve ever spoken to, seen or researched said that they’re solitary animals? Hold my beer.
The beginning
Freya was first, seventy grams of beautiful podge, some of the most breathtaking colours I’ve ever seen on a leopard gecko. She was calm and manageable and everything you could ever want in a small terrestrial gecko.
She was perfect.
She went into quarantine and that gave me chance to prepare a home for her. With her immaculate condition, I decided to add her to my leopard gecko breeding project.
Nothing flashy or high end.
Healthy animals producing healthy offspring at their own pace. No pressure from me to produce eggs constantly. A single mating and up to 16 eggs per year. That’ll do nicely.
I started off with a 48 x 18 x 18-inch wooden vivarium. Overhead heating, low level UVB – ferguson zone 1 specifically, piles of slate arranged as a loose pile spread across three quarters of the enclosure, hides dug in there too. And the substrate was a mix of tight packed and loose sand/clay/stone mix. Dried leaves, dried grasses, driftwood piled across the slate and finished with a huge bunch of planted sedge grass on the cool side. Underneath that plant was a hide that remained at around 70% relative humidity.
We were set and Freyas brand spanky new build was ready to go!
Enter Freya
After a week of quarantine, I pronounced Freya healthy and introduced her into what I shall describe from now on as her palace.
Freya is a large gecko, a fantastic sized female, but she looked dwarfed in this palace I’d created.
She disappeared into the slate pile; I watched for a moment then left her to it.
I saw her periodically throughout the day – searching under rock and stone, digging under the sedge grass, climbing the branches, basking for heat and UV (the classic leopard “sploot”) and investigating the water bowl like she’d never seen anything like it before.
All seemed well. This is exactly the sort of behaviour I would expect from an adult leopard gecko in a new enclosure. Inquisitive and active.
She began feeding immediately, continued to bask and interact with whatever she wanted to in her palace.
I held my head up proudly. I’d played a blinder on this build and I’m not afraid to enjoy it!
I allowed her to settle properly before I even considered mating her with one of my males. She deserved the break.
Then something happened that changed my opinion of leopard geckos entirely.
Or it would in time at least.
Alice? Who the f**k is Alice?
As I was deciding which male to put with Freya, Alice arrived.
Alice was not quite as large as Freya, but she makes up for that with sass.
She had attitude. She wasn’t flighty or particularly fast, but she oozed a permanently annoyed aura. She didn’t want to be handled, poked prodded or messed with. She was the typical “look but don’t touch” girl. And I respected that. Mostly.
She had to have a physical once over and 2 weeks in quarantine before I did anything with her.
What was I going to do with her?
She was a pretty little thing, more muted in colour than Freya, but she had spots and dots like stars in the sky! Thousands of them that made her look almost ethereal. She was a more subtle type of beauty rarely seen in modern leopard morphs.
Maybe I should breed her too? She would produce some amazing babies. Her looks and attitude would carry through. I bloody hope they would anyway.
But where was I going to put her?
I didn’t have room for another 4foot build. But any less than my best for this beautiful girl just wasn’t worth considering.
What was the answer?
I found myself researching everything I could find on cohabitation in leopard geckos.
There was not much.
“Keep them alone”
“They will fight”
“Don’t keep more than one”
Eventually, I found field observations from Pakistan describing leopard geckos living in loose aggregations in the wild. That stopped me in my tracks. It wasn't proof that two females could or should share an enclosure, but it didn't sit particularly comfortably with the absolute “leopard geckos live alone” rule I kept finding everywhere else.
Could I pull this off?
Introductions
Introducing Alice into Freya’s palace was initially incredibly stressful.
Would there be the tearing of scales?
Chunks of leopard geckos flying?
Dropped tails being used as clubs?
It was bad.
In my mind.
In reality, Alice quietly wandered into Freyas palace and disappeared into the rock work and buried hides. No blood, no gore and certainly no beating each other with severed appendages.
I was watching like a hawk. Nothing was happening.
Then there was movement, Alice sauntering around the enclosure, very similar to Freya when she first got into the palace.
She was seeing the sights and testing every nook and cranny. She eventually settled and started basking under overhead heat.
I left her to it.
A few hours later I heard a clicking sound. Nothing crazy, not the high-pitched scream that I often associate with a disgruntled leopard gecko, quiet intermittent clicks.
Puzzled, I watched to see if anything would develop. More clicks, this time from both sides of the vivarium.
Were these girls talking? I don’t know enough about vocalisations in leopard geckos to even hazard a guess as to what they were saying, or even if they were saying anything.
Curiosity got the better of me, so I did what any serious researcher does when two leopard geckos start making noises at each other and you haven't got a fucking clue what's happening. I Googled it.
Clicking, apparently, could occur during interactions with other leopard geckos. Well, that was interesting.
Less interesting was the familiar statement sitting further down the page.
Leopard geckos are solitary animals.
There it was again.
Quickly followed by:
Why cohousing leopard geckos is dangerous.
That one really bothered me.
Next steps
I had to make sure that the animals I had put into this situation weren’t going to kill each other. I set up cameras, cheap internet jobies that I could watch 24 hours a day to make sure everything was ok. That there was no violence.
I physically checked both girls over every morning for a solid four weeks just to be doubly sure.
And,
Nothing. They were both fine.
Watching the live feed of them most evenings showed nothing at all. I started seeing changes in behaviour with the girls. They dropped into a routine of sorts.
Morning - bask in the heat.
Afternoon - move into hiding and stealth-bask under the UV.
Early evening – the never-ending search for food.
They did these things together. Together is a broad statement. It seemed that the movement from one or the other prompted movement from their counterpart.
They still did things separately of course, drinking, digging, exploring. These were solitary things and with two six-inch animals in a 48-inch enclosure with multiple levels and depths of substrate, hides and places to disappear, they could do those things without the other animal constantly being present.
Had I, in my efforts to create the best and most naturalistic enclosure for a leopard gecko, created a workable enclosure for two?
Only time would tell.
Many years later…
Four years, three months and one week later….
Somewhere along the way, I stopped waiting for it to go wrong.
I left my employment and I took my animals with me. All 24 of them. That was a fun day and a tale for another time.
In those four years Alice and Freya never had a single disagreement. They did with various males that were going in to breed the girls, and the scales did indeed fly.
As relaxed as Freya was and as peaceful as her cohousing was with Alice, she hated any male that went in with them with the fire of a thousand suns. That’s when I heard screeching, squeaking and loud chirping. Gone were the peaceful, almost inaudible clicks of the girls.
The palace was under siege, and these proud ladies were putting up one hell of a fight!
The girls were mated and bred. Eventually. They produced wonderful hatchlings – my daughter has one of Freya’s first hatchlings, Spot Splat, she is just turned 3 years old.
Freya and Alice lived together in harmony for all that time. No disagreements, no squabbles, no hurty words.
They did well.
They continue to do well.
They aren’t with me anymore, but they are with dear friends who treat them like the princesses they are.
Freya and Alice? Cohabbed leopard geckos?
Hold my beer.
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