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| Lizzy - her first night in her new home - Jan 4, 2014! |
So, as Christmas and birthdays approached, I had ZERO good ideas for a gift for Ryan. As desperation set in, as to what we could give our sweet little boy for Christmas and his birthday, I decided to take his desire for a gecko/echo more seriously. I started where any self-respecting person starts these days, Google, and I quickly learned that geckos are considered an ideal pet for young children. Whaaaaat??? Who knew? Well, apparently Ryan knew, but I was clueless. So, after several weeks of intense internet research, Kevin and I decided that getting a gecko would be just grand.
As with everything else here, that one decision left us with a few more hurdles to climb. Just exactly where in the heck do you buy such an animal in Tokyo? Here began a very interesting process. My internet search (in Japanese) proved not very fruitful, so I just started asking random people. Some moms looked at me like I was certifiably insane (which I'm used to these days) and others seemed politely amused. Still others seemed downright excited by the idea. Within hours of me asking a friend from soccer, she had e-mailed me a list of several pet shops in Tokyo (turns out she had had a pet salamander for 10 years so she understood the situation more than others).
Then came the fun part. Calling these pet shops to ask IN JAPANESE if they had spotted leopard geckos, high-yellow type (the least expensive species), if they expected to have them in January, how old they were, the price, etc. Based on these calls, I narrowed it down to about three different pet shops, scattered all around Tokyo, and over a span of several weeks in late November / early December, I visited all three.
Completely unrelated, but I have the oddest assortment of Japanese vocabulary than any non-fluent foreigner I know. Dragonfly larva in Japanese - check. Spotted leopard gecko in Japanese - check. In case you're wondering, Lizzy is a hyoumon tokage modoki (ひょうもんとかげもどき). At about the same time as I'm calling all the pet shops in Tokyo, Kevin tells me that someone from work overheard him on the phone making dinner reservations in Japanese and was VERY impressed. What the Hades? Kevin gets kudos for saying "4 people at 8 o'clock" in Japanese and I'm having to ask questions about care of a spotted leopard gecko species. Seriously? Where is justice in this world?
Back to the Lizzy story. I also asked a friend in my Japanese class and it turns out a guy in her lab has 10 geckos and random lizards and he was happy to recommend a huge reptile shop in Tokyo (my friend is an animal behavior researcher at Tokyo University, mostly dogs and horses though, not lizards). Unfortunately, this shop is waaaaay on the other side of Tokyo but it's added to the top of the list. So, I visited about 3 different places that had these geckos and I was smitten. They let me hold them and I became completely and utterly convinced that Ryan would love one (or maybe I was just convinced that I would love one)!
One last hurdle. Turns out that the life span for this kind of gecko can be up to TWENTY years, so here I am on the phone with the US Fish and Wildlife Service (thankfully this was in English) to find out if and how one might import this kind of animal from Japan to the US. Assuming we end up back in the US within this pet's lifespan (ie 20 years), I had to know that we could bring it back with us. I was not about to make Ryan leave his pet behind this time. I spoke to a very kind Fish and Wildlife agent and she explained that we can import it from Japan to the US, that we just have to make an appointment with them at our port of entry to inspect her (free during regular business hours and an overtime charge if we land after normal business hours). No quarantine or anything, so that was good. One potentially tricky thing might be finding an airline or flight that will transport her, but that's a bridge we will have to cross later...
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| Lizzy's cozy little cage... |
With that last piece of the puzzle in place, we made the plan to give Ryan the gecko accessories for Christmas, and the actual gecko for his birthday (after we got back from our trip to Thailand). We also planned on taking Ryan to the pet shop on his birthday to see the geckos, but our thought at the time was that we wouldn't actually get the gecko until a month later after returning from our trip to LA for Dan's wedding. Ummm.... didn't quite work out that way.
On Ryan's birthday, we headed to the reptile shop of choice. It was about an hour away by train... and they had a lot of geckos! We all went there with the understanding that we would not be getting a gecko on that day. Ryan actually seemed fine with that - he was acting way, way more mature than me. Ryan had immediately selected the gecko that he liked and I pointed out that it might not be here when we come back, so we might end up buying a different one. I might have over-emphasized that point out of my own self-interest. For me, it had been m-o-n-t-h-s of waiting and anticipation for Ryan to get this pet, and maybe, just maybe, I sort-of-kind-of-encouraged us to go ahead and get the gecko. Maybe...
So, we brought her home! We learned that she had been bred in the US and that she was a female (?). On the walk and train ride home, the name Lizzy was suggested and it stuck!
We left the reptile shop with a few key pieces of information - she needed to eat 3-5 live crickets per day and the temperature of her cage needed to be between 28-32 degrees Celsius (82-90 degrees Fahrenheit). We already had her cage, the undercage heating mat, the cage thermometer, her dry shelter, and her wet shelter. But we also came home with 50 live crickets that day.
First step was to try to get her cage warm enough in our freezing cold house. Nothing we were doing seemed to be working; the thermometer was not reading more than 18 degrees. We even put an electric blanket around her cage, but to no avail. I went to bed that night fearing that we would wake up to an unhappy or unhealthy and very cold gecko. The next morning, I called the reptile shop and explained that the heater was not keeping her cage warm enough. Through this conversation, we learned that we had the thermometer on the wrong setting - why it is supposed to be set on the "in water" setting and not the "air" setting is something I still do not understand, but once we changed the thermometer setting, the temperature was much, much closer to the correct range. Whew! That was a close one...
A few fun tidbits of Lizzy's life (and most spotted leopard geckos):
- She was 3 months old when we brought her home, but Ryan has decided that her birthday will be the day she first came to live with us - which just happens to be his birthday, January 4.
- They told us that she might not eat for a week while she was getting used to her new environment. Lucky for us, she ate on Day 2.
- She sheds her skin every 2-3 weeks - this is why she needs a "wet shelter," a small box in her cage that is high in humidity and aids in shedding her skin. Just before she sheds, she turns sort of a milky white color and within a day or 2 later, she is back to her normal color. Geckos eat their skin so as not to leave any traces behind to alert possible predators.
- She is quite a good cricket hunter! The reptile shop guys told us that we should remove the crickets' legs to make it easier for her to catch them. We did that for the first few days, but quickly learned that she is perfectly capable of catching the crickets on her own, so we stopped doing that.
- She swallows the crickets whole, and she needs the surface heat to help her digest the whole crickets. And the crickets she eats are not at all small - they are about the size of her head. She also stores fat reserves in her tail - and clearly she is not underfed as her tail is HUGE, as in about the same width as her body.
- She often licks her lips with her long tongue after she eats a gecko - it's rather amusing to watch!
- Unlike most other geckos, spotted leopard geckos have moveable eyelids. They also sometimes clean their eyelids with their tongue - also very interesting to watch.
- Geckos can lose their tails and regenerate new ones - it's a defense mechanism, but so far, Lizzy's tail is doing just fine.
- Leopard geckos in the wild originate from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India.
- She always poops in the exact same place in her cage EVERYTIME - this makes cleaning up quite easy. For some reason, she has chosen her spot to be inside her rock shelter. As Kevin said, "apparently she is used to indoor plumbing."
- She likes to come out of her cage and she seems quite happy to climb up your sleeve, sit on your shoulder, and climb back down. She sometimes stands on her hind legs and tries to climb up and out of her cage - Ryan thinks this means she wants to be held.
- Lizzy was 5 inches long (head to tail) when we brought her home. We just measured her a few days ago (not quite 2 months later) and she was 7 inches long. They are typically 8-10 inches when full-grown.
Ryan takes great care of Lizzy, feeding her, cleaning her cage, and often building her playgrounds in various cardboard boxes.
She is a hit and a fun new member of our family!
And just for fun, here's Lizzy starring in her first movie! Enjoy... (and just for a little background, this is a clip from a DVD we made for for 2 1/2 year old cousin Stephen and he loves dinosaurs)
