#leopard gecko help

[conkreetmonkey]

Fuck, my leopard gecko has fallen ill. He's had a squinty, slightly puffy eye for about two weeks now, which I was hoping was just irritation from a bit of substrate. He was still functional, just with worse vision, but he's tong-fed anyway so it didn't really matter. I had to help him remove shed from that eye at one point, which he did NOT make easy because, understandably, animals generally don't like it when big metal tweezers come within a millimeter of their eyeball.

NOW his other eye has started to go in the same direction; he can still open it, but doesn't seem to like to, and when he does it looks wrong, as if it's fully black and matte-er than it should be (it's hard to tell, because he naturally has dark grey eyes with black patterning on the irises/scleras and black pupils, and also his eyelids are mostly rimmed with black), AND his right "gonad" (whatever you call the two lumps on male gecko genitals, I honestly forget) is pink and swollen... he's definitely sick.

I tried to feed him, but he wasn't having it, and I can't tell if it's because he's refusing food as seriously ill animals often do, or if he simply can't see the waxworm. When a leopard gecko keeps its mouth firmly shut as you rub a dusted waxworm against his nose, you KNOW something's wrong. I was honestly hoping to annoy him into chomping down on it, upon which, if it's a vision issue, I imagine he'd recognize it as food, swallow, and understand I was trying to feed him. He eventually hid in his hole (so he can still navigate his tank to some degree, but maybe it's just memory?), so I'll try to feed him again and use our old "feeding time" pavlov signal (scrunching plastic) to hopefully get him in an eating mood. I know he can hear, because he has been following my voice.

What rotten timing, I now need to find an exotic vet before they all shut down for the holidays. I messaged one right after noticing his eye, and after several days they emailed me back saying that their reptile specialist was out for an indeterminate period of time and recommended other offices in the area. After this, I foolishly, irresponsibly thought I could just use some eye flush on him to get the substrate out, but it's clearly not substrate but an illness at this point... Guess it's time to get searching. I should probably try to find and contact the couple that ran the small local mom-and-pop herp store before an improbable chain of unlucky life events forced them to temporarily shut down (injury, illness, the landlord jacking up the price, AND car troubles all within a month... poor guys), they'll likely have advice.

Honestly, this is almost certainly 100% my fault. I procrastinated on obtaining the eye flush, because I'd need to get a ride to the store and was stupidly afraid of asking my own parents or sister for help for almost a WEEK... I keep him on sub-par substrate because it's easier to clean, and feed him a sub-par diet because he's picky and too bad at hunting for crickets so he lives mainly on dusted worms (the equivalent of a human living mainly on red meat).

I've felt guilt over this for about as long as I've owned him, but if he survives this, I may well just bite the bullet and rehome him to someone more capable or the local sanctuary. I'm a serial procrastinator and generally just an irresponsible pos who has killed multiple cactuses... I shouldn't own an exotic pet. I got him when I was 10, and I shouldn't have. I have no business owning such an advanced, finicky animal now, let alone did I as a child. I've avoided facing this for too long, and now my pet is paying the price for my unwillingness to face my guilt.

FUCK.

(If anybody thinks they know what this illness is and/or anything I can do to help him before I'm able to get him to a herp-qualified vet, PLEASE let me know)

[pastrygeckos]

Flan is just so adorable! There's a couple scales of shed still left on her face, but they're so minor they'll come off on their own. She ate a yummy roach and went for a nice big toasty plop in my hand

[mirkwood-trash]

It's been almost exactly a year since I brought Nighttime Dan home... She's almost unrecognizable in her old pics ... She's come so far and is doing so well 🥹🩷

(January 2024 vs December 2024)

[futuremercifulnerd]

Some sketches from tonight

[frain-breeze]

Hello, I’m asking for immediate help from folks with a kind heart and I figured the tumblr community might be just the place. My name is Hayden, I have 1 sister and together we have 9 pets. We are going through a bit of homelessness and need some assistance. We are able to have someone we know come and get us and take us across the country to have a roof over our head, but there’s at least 10 days before they are able to even come. We will have to check into a hotel for those 10 days, but are running short on money. We need $600 total, my friend was able to donate 200 out of the kindness of his heart. We do not have any family who can support us, our dad has been absent our whole life, and we are out of a home because we had to escape our abusive heavily alcoholic mother. We need about $400 more to cover the cost of the hotel. We will be able to bring our pets to keep them safe and warm. We have a lot of reptiles who require proper heating and cannot be out in the cold while we are waiting for our transportation. We have 2 bearded dragons, 3 leopard geckos, a blue tongue skink, a curly hair tarantula, a red eared slider turtle and a tortoiseshell kitty cat. We are out Monday OCT. 30th, so we truly are out of time. This is an emergency. Please help. Please ❤️ I will be posting updates and proof on the fundraiser as well as I’m trying to be as open and transparent about our struggles as possible.

**** IF YOU CANNOT USE PAYPAL I HAVE VENMO, CASH APP, AND CHIME ****

[mytortoisegotstuckinatupperware]

its days like these where I just want to be one of my geckos

small, brainless, and fed applesauce-adjacent snacks by a large, friendly giant who expects nothing from me

[bewarebugbear]

girls who have a leopard gecko that they make hats for

[rayraywildkinhelp]

Kin tips for a leopard gecko? /pos

kin tips for a leopard gecko!

eat fruit! geckos eat nectar, insects, and fruit, but insects and nectar are a little harder to obtain than fruit

wear clothes or makeup with yellow colors or spots! clothes are the obvious option, but makeup is also a good resource to make yourself look more like your kintype!

wear gloves to imitate their hands!

go to places with lots of rocks to climb on!

sorry for short list, hope this helps!

[nightmaretour]

Having probably never successfully hunted something before in her life prior to me getting her on account of never being offered anything appropriately sized that wasn't a wax worm, Cynder is an EXCEPTIONALLY bad hunter. She gives it her best shot, but she doesn't seem to understand the idea of stealth and as soon as something is out of her direct field of view she seems to just give up. Usually she just can't find it or it ends up getting into somewhere she can't reach (sometimes they climb under her and she isn't sure what to do about it) and she ends up just looking at me expectantly for help.

I love her though, so I always catch it for her and end up hand feeding her crickets and roaches. I know she probably won't learn if I keep doing it, but she always looks so sad and bewildered by it all.

[goldenkingyo]

Please, if you cannot donate then do consider sharing as much as possible! Trying to help a close friend of mine escape a very abusive and toxic household.

[notbornwithit]

Little dino bbs

[inbabylontheywept]

The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[sosoftandhuggy]

My darlings, Molly and Smokey 💕

reblog with a picture of your pet/pets pretty please I want to see y’all’s animals

[tinytrashkid]

badger is currently asleep from weed downstairs. i wonder how many more cuts i can get away with tonight...

[mytortoisegotstuckinatupperware]

im a struggling single father

of one (1) dumb blonde, the horniest mf alive, a little traumatized man who refuses to go to therapy, one (1) spectacular go-getter booted from summer camp for being "too enthusiastic," two (2) lil beans without personalities, a chubby monster who wiggles when he's upset, a stone hamburger biting everything in sight, and my dog.

[fourteenbatsstapledtogether]

Apparently the staff at my local pet store assigned me rat owner based on vibes alone (and buying crickets) years ago and no one every thought to ask what I actually have