- At this point, I feel like I say this in every video,
but I'm gonna say it again,
this is a bit more of a controversial topic.
Today, we're gonna talk about whether you can house
multiple leopard geckos together in the same and enclosure.
(relaxing jazz music)
so there's quite of a spectrum of opinions
on whether you can keep multiple geckos together or not.
Ranging from you can keep as many as you want,
and as small of an enclosure as you want,
all the way to he other end of you can never house
any leopard geckos together,
they have to be in their own individual enclosures
no matter what.
Personally, based on my experience and my research,
I follow somewhere slightly in the middle of these.
My very short answer, being that you can house
certain leopard geckos together and they'll do just fine
as I have with maybe three or so pairs so far.
However there are a lot of guidelines, you can call them
that you would have to follow to make sure
they're going to be safe and healthy,
and get along with each other.
So right off the bat, keeping multiple male leopard geckos
together is a pretty big no-no
in just about everybody's eyes.
Now, we take in different rescue animals with emerald scales
and we took in some geckos where they were,
I think it was two males and two females, house together
in a five gallon.
Personally, I tend to suggest a twenty gallon minimum
for a single leopard gecko.
So shoveling and form to a five gallon
does not work very well.
The geckos did not come out too well either.
One of which had all of hus toes bitten off,
and it was covered in scars because the male basically
bullied her, 'cause he didn't like her
as much as the other female.
Now, hopefully if you're researching geckos,
you would by now know that that is not a good idea.
But that is a rare case
that hopefully does not happen too often.
Hopefully.
Females on the other hand, can occasionally get along
in the same enclosure.
However, there are risks that come along with that.
So, because males tend to be more territorial
and dominant towards each other, keeping more than one male
in the same enclosure will pretty much always result
in them fighting or stressing each other out
to the point that one is injured or killed,
or both are killed if they manage
to injure each other enough.
Hopefully you would realize this before they're dead.
But they can fight quickly,
and you definitely do not want to risk this.
So if you have your eye on two make geckos,
and you're thinking of keeping them together,
I'm gonna crush your dreams now.
Please don't do it.
Now there's gonna be people that say the exact same thing
about keeping females together,
and keeping the male and females together.
Obviously if you're breeding,
this is going to be an exception.
The male and female are gonna have to be together
at some point to actually populate and create some babies.
But we're not gonna talk about that in this video.
We can jump straight into multiple females together.
Now, they can also have interesting attitudes
where they are simply not going to want to get along
with other geckos.
But there are some cases where they do.
Now, like I said, I've done this maybe
with three pairs of females or so,
and they all did perfectly fine.
But there are a lot of things that come along
with this, that are essentially more of a pain
than housing them separately which I'll get into
in just a minute.
But the step you're going have to take is actually see
if these two females are going to get along.
This by itself is risky
because you are still putting them together.
And even if you're monitoring them, something can happen
and then as soon as you're done monitoring them,
something else can still happen because they're animals,
they can just change their mind.
But because there's no guarantee that two geckos
are gonna get along, this means that you can exactly just
go out, buy two geckos, and hope that they get along.
'Cause if they don't, they're gonna have to be separate
meaning you'll need a second enclosure,
perfectly set up and ready to go.
Now in my case, because I keep a handful of animals,
and they come in and go in as we get different rescues,
I thankfully always have about another like,
five or six enclosures that can be set up at anytime
if an animal does not get along with another animal.
So, if you have two enclosures already set up,
in case they don't get along, then it's probably best
to just go ahead and separate them anyway.
You can take them out together maybe,
depending on how they act.
As you can see there's a couple around the room right now.
But let's say, you do decide,
just set up two full enclosures,
you're gonna get two female geckos, see if they get along.
And if they do get along, you're gonna put them together.
Again, things could change, they might not always end up
getting along in the end.
But let's say they do end up doing really well.
This enclosure will need to be quite different
than an enclosure for one gecko.
First off, they're gonna need more space
because there's two animals in the area.
Like I said, my usual role is a 12 to 20 gallon
for a single gecko which means that ideally,
tow geckos will have more space.
Some people will say a thirty for two,
some will say a forty,
and I'm sure there's other opinions on them.
But it does not end there because geckos need
lots of hiding places.
You might have the rule before that one gecko
needs three hides.
On hide in the warmer part of the enclosure,
one hide in the cooler part of the enclosure,
and then a third hide which you'd call a humidity hide
or a moist box, it has lots of names,
and this will basically be where the gecko can go
and easily shed.
I've gone into detail with those
on a leopard gecko care video that I did last year,
or something.
But because you're gonna have two geckos,
that means you might need six hiding places.
It's gonna be kind of hard to cram six things
into an enclosure but that ideally
what you're going to be doing if you have
two leopard geckos together.
Now, you could probably get by with just one humidity hide
'cause chances are, they won't probably into shed
in the time.
But doing so could be considered cutting corners
with your husbandry and that's not the smartest thing to do.
So let's go ahead and say you would need six hides
in an enclosure for two leopard geckos
which at that point, you might as well separate them
into two.
So basically, what I'm getting into that
is even if two females can get along at certain times,
in the end, that's probably more convenient
for both you and the animal to separate them.
Something that I forgot to mention is let say,
you have one gecko, you put food in its bowl,
and then you come back to see if it ate.
If the food is gone, you're like, okay, cool, it ate.
But if you have two geckos, you don't know
how much each one of them actually ate.
So this means you also have to monitor their feeding
when there's more than one 'cause you do not want one
hogging the food or the nutrition over the other.
Ow, why are you biting me?
So at this point, you might be questioning like me,
what's even the point in keeping leopard geckos together?
Are there any?
At first, I was like, yeah, it will be beneficial
'cause there's less enclosures to clean,
a little bit less space taken up,
less heating sources being used,
but in the end, you're gonna need the same amount
because they are individual animals
with individual necessities.
And when it comes to feeding, is one of them really
taking over the food dishes, like even if you have
multiple dishes in there, there's a pretty solid chance
that one could just go in and sweep up all the food
before the other even gets a chance to eat.
In other cases, the geckos have eaten out of the same bowl,
just fine.
They kind of take turns and it's kind of cute.
But again, there are risks with that.
Who knows if one will get angry
because somebody's hogging on the food,
or if one ends up just not getting enough nutrition
because of that.
And then there's things like monitoring its poop even.
Most of the time, you just go in, pick the poop up,
and you're good to go.
But poop is a great way to basically keep track
of the health of your animal.
So let's get kind of graphic and gross.
Let's say one of the poop has a weird color,
and it's like mushy, and not looking too good,
how are you actually gonna know which gecko
that's coming from?
Maybe one is sick, or has something going on,
maybe it's not digesting its food well.
But you really can't, like tell which poop it came from
unless you actually see it pooping.
On top of that, let's say one is sick,
then that means that it may be something contagious
that can end up in one of your other geckos.
So you might end up with double the problems
if the sickness spreads across the entire enclosure
and is ending, you have to deal with it
in more than one gecko.
The more I talk about this, the more I realize
that I will not be housing leopard geckos together
in the future.
And like I said, you might be wondering,
why did you even do it in the past?
Well, it was mostly so that I could see it's like myself.
I did it as safely as possible.
But I didn't wanted just listen to random things
that I read online.
I wanted to really see just how it is.
And in the past, I have done it
in an effort to save time and space.
But in the end, that's really not worth it
when it comes to the health of an animal.
And like I said, it doesn't even really save
any time or space 'cause you need a larger enclosure,
and you need to like spend more time on everything.
Maybe this video sounded a little bit biased.
I tried to keep it as unbiased as possible
with all the different opinions.
But as you can tell, I'm kind of swaying
to this side of really just avoid housing them together.
Unless you are doing some sort of breeding project.
But if you are breeding,
hopefully you will have had enough experience
with the geckos already that you can make your own
educated decision on the topic.
So there we go.
That's just about everything I've got.
And whether you can house multiple leopard geckos together,
here's an overview.
Male leopard geckos, don't house them together,
female leopard geckos, you might be able to house together,
but it comes with its risks, and its demands
and extra guidelines, and...
At a certain point, is it really worth the benefit
that you're getting for doing so?
So let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.
Again, if you have more than one gecko,
chances are they can hang out and chill together,
there will be cases where they'd don't get along too well.
But there's always those times where
they really don't mind each other.
So it's definitely fun.
I love having lots of leopard geckos.
It's, I don't know why.
I'm just addicted to them.
So that's it.
Okay, that's it.
I'm Alex, and thanks for watching.
(relaxing jazz music)