New Water Dragon Owner

[Mountain Dragons]

Hello!
New to the forum and to water dragons. I live in the Rocky Mountains in the US so finding anyone with first hand experience on Eastern Water Dragons is impossible. They are extremely rare and often even less affordable, so when I stumbled across a pair for less than the price of a Lechi gecko I couldn't resist. I'm sure I will come back with tons of questions but I just have a few for now. Feel free to offer any information a new owner could use.

1. They are hatchlings, roughly 24cm nose to tail, guessing 5-8 weeks old. At what stage does dimorphism kick in and you can be positive of the sex? They are the same age, one is bigger, stockier and has orange on its chest, but I have heard that that may not necessarily give a positive ID at that stage.

2. They have just started their first molt, about 2 days ago. The small one has a glove of old skin still on 1/3rd of the tail and the larger one hasn't lost any except for the head. I mist them and they always have clean water, at what point should I be concerned and intervene? I try to keep the humidity up in the enclosure but our external humidity is typically 0-2% so it fluctuates inside when I'm at work.

3. Getting two at once, having no experience with this species was very impulsive. They are in a temporary tub enclosure now, I will have them in an intermediate 93x45x80cm within the weekend and I am building a 2.5x1.2x1m for them that should be ready in a month. Assuming they are not both male will these enclosures be enough? They both have 3 horizontal levels using branches, basking rocks and hammocks to increase the usable space.

Thanks!

 

[Sdaji]

Congratulations on your new acquisitions! Water Dragons are pretty tough, they're very common in all the waterways all along the east coast of Australia (a stretch of thousands of km/miles), they're common in a lot of suburban areas, not really a specialist species, so you shouldn't have too much trouble keeping them happy.

1) It's not like they all hit 8 months of age and on that day become clearly sexually dimorphic. Some become obvious earlier or later than others. Your larger one with the orange is probably a male, certainly impossible to say for sure without seeing it. You'll know in time.

2) Unless you live in an extremely hostile environment, I doubt it's typically 0-2% humidity outdoors. I'd be very surprised if it had ever been below 1% wherever you live - only very extreme environments ever get below 1%, and I don't think anywhere on the planet averages anything near that low. Maybe that was a typo. Anyway, I don't know what type of enclosure you have for them, but these aren't called Water Dragons for nothing, they're never found far from water and you really should have enough water for them to fully submerge in. You can even keep them in large aquaria basically full of water with enough area to get out of it. If you give them that much water in the enclosure it should keep the humidity up, and they'll soak if they want to (wild Water Dragons do spend a lot of time fully in the water, swimming around, and often they sleep in the water).

3) No idea how you have it set up, but those enclosures are certainly large enough.

 

[Mountain Dragons]

Thanks for the input,
yes, I always proofread but even now I see a few typos (a tad dyslexic, wot!). I live in an alpine desert so our humidity is 10-20% rarely bumping up to 35. So yeah, dry but not quite the Atacama.

 

[Sdaji]

Thanks for the input,
yes, I always proofread but even now I see a few typos (a tad dyslexic, wot!). I live in an alpine desert so our humidity is 10-20% rarely bumping up to 35. So yeah, dry but not quite the Atacama.

Yeah, I assumed you weren't living on Arrakis so that makes a bit more sense Even 10-20% is extremely low. That being the case it might be worth keeping yours in a primarily aquatic setup.