Cao ,

Im new here and just wanted to stop by and say hi

Cao ,

Im new here and just wanted to stop by and say hi

[laura88]

Do you know what I noticed about sand? It gets in the lizards eyes and irritates them. after saying I would never try sand I switched to it because my lizard was unhappy
on wood chip, well she must have kicked some into her eye by accident because after a few weeks her eyes wre swollen and she was miserable. I took it straight out and I use the carpet stuff now and, after a bit of panicking from me, my little gecko is all better.

[Immy]

I've been using Calcium Sand in my leopard gecko's vivarium for several months now. In every pet shop we've been in since, I've noticed they too use the same in their gecko's tanks and recommend it, too.

Calcium Sand is edible and doesn't create problems with their digestive system. I haven't noticed any problems occuring - he seems happy and lively. I've read on a website that calcium sand is bad as it encourages the gecko to eat it (being 100% edible) but when we first got our gecko a few months ago, we had to put him in a tank with playsand for an hour or so while we bought some calcium sand and when we returned home, we noticed him licking it!!! However, since we changed it to calcium sand we haven't noticed him doing this at all and we keep a close eye on him. He seems a lot more lively too since we changed his substrate.

Of course, if any problems did occur then we would change it immediately but so far, so good I think it entirely depends on the gecko and which substrate it's been kept on in the past. I hope this helps.

[cbo1170]

I've only had my Gecko for three weeks now and its my first. The pet shop sold us Calci-sand to line the base of the viv with and from an asthetic point of view it looks excellent.

After reading the comments on this thread I was worried about impaction, particularly as my Leo is still only young and I'm a noob to all this, however some of the replies from members who have had issues with compaction seem to relate to when their Leo's are eating food off the sand and digesting it with whatever staple diet they're fed on.

My own Leo has a feeding bowl (staple diet being mealworms) into which the mealworms go, with an overhang so the buggers can't escape. I sprinkle Calci Dust into this to coat the mealworms each time to give my Leo the calcium that it needs, hopefully preventing the need for it to seek calcium elsewhere. This way it never eats off the sand and will hopefully avoid compaction.

I've no plans to change to an alernative viv lining at present but if things start to go wrong then the slate idea sounds excellent!