Mourning Geckos

[chibicricket]

I'm doing a lot of enclosure upgrades for the new year in my reptile room, and will be moving my 6 month old male crestie, Loki, to a 18x18x24 bioactive enclosure. So I will have an extra 12x12x18 exo terra, which I thought about maybe filling it with another frog, but I have quite a few already, and they can get pretty loud, especially when raining outside. So I was thinking mourning geckos, like 2 or 3. Does anyone have any experience with them? Pros/Cons?

 

[acpart]

I don't have any personal experience with them but if you get 2 or 3 you will soon have more than 2 or 3 so you should also think about whether other people you know may want some.

Aliza

 

[Herpin Man]

I’ve been working with mourning geckos for a few years now. They are active, engaging little geckos. I find them to be easy to keep, generally speaking. They will eat most small feeder insects, as well as prepared foods. Cons are that they are good at escaping anything but the tightest enclosure. They really aren’t handleable, and because they are parthenogenic, they can reproduce uncontrollably.

 

[acpart]

If you decide to go with the mourning geckos in the exo-terra, you can use clear packing tape to narrow the spaces between the doors and the sides and you can use aluminum foil tape to cover every single joint around the top of the cage. I keep a few species of micro gecko and I thought I had everything covered until they started to escape. Cover every place where the top meets the sides!

Aliza

 

[jclee]

I've got a few. It's my second time trying them, simply because I didn't secure my first enclosure well enough and lost them eventually. This time, for now, they're in a home-made 1 gallon plastic jar enclosure that is escape proof (so far). I hope to upgrade them (or their offspring?) to a 12x12x18, but I'm going to do my best to escape proof it, first. I've been reading a lot about that. I'll line the front ventilation panels with sponge filter, glue the vents in the lid in place and obstruct them, and be really careful when opening/closing the doors to reduce accidents. That said, I've not made this move, yet, because my little jar enclosure is working pretty well, and I might just stick with it, in the end.
(I think Clint's Reptiles' Mourning Gecko video goes through some basics of escape proofing enclosures and/or modifying a large jar, so you can check that out, too, before you commit to anything.)