should I provide marbled geckos heating?

[AskingAboutGeckos]

I'm getting some marbled geckos soon, but I wanted to double check what I should do about heating since I've seen a lot of mixed opinions.
if you own/have owned marbled geckos, did you provide heating for them? if so, what kind of bulb did you use and what strength?

 

[Sdaji]

It depends what the temperatures will be. People sometimes say 'Species *** does not need heat' or something similar, but every reptile, actually, every living thing needs heat. If you live in an extremely hot place, you may not need to heat anything. If you live in an extremely cold place, you're going to have to heat every reptile you keep.

Marbled Geckoes are extremely cold tolerant - I've seen them out actively foraging at under 10 degrees celcius, but they'll try to keep themselves warmer than that and you should give them the opportunity during the day. I've never used bulbs as heat for geckoes, and if you want to use a light bulb, the wattage will depend on the size of your enclosure, the temperature of the room, etc.

Incidentally, when I live in QLD it wasn't cold enough for them and I used to put them in the fridge overnight during winter to cool them, and they'd still want to feed during the day. Basically, they're cold climate geckoes which should be given cold nights for most of the year and moderate to warm temperatures for a few hours each day for most of the year.

 

[AskingAboutGeckos]

It depends what the temperatures will be. People sometimes say 'Species *** does not need heat' or something similar, but every reptile, actually, every living thing needs heat. If you live in an extremely hot place, you may not need to heat anything. If you live in an extremely cold place, you're going to have to heat every reptile you keep.

Marbled Geckoes are extremely cold tolerant - I've seen them out actively foraging at under 10 degrees celcius, but they'll try to keep themselves warmer than that and you should give them the opportunity during the day. I've never used bulbs as heat for geckoes, and if you want to use a light bulb, the wattage will depend on the size of your enclosure, the temperature of the room, etc.

Incidentally, when I live in QLD it wasn't cold enough for them and I used to put them in the fridge overnight during winter to cool them, and they'd still want to feed during the day. Basically, they're cold climate geckoes which should be given cold nights for most of the year and moderate to warm temperatures for a few hours each day for most of the year.

I live in South Aus, and it never really gets unbearably cold in my room. I suppose I could just get a heating pad and turn it on when it gets cold

 

[Sdaji]

I live in South Aus, and it never really gets unbearably cold in my room. I suppose I could just get a heating pad and turn it on when it gets cold

It doesn't matter where you are, you're never going to have it so cold inside a normal Australian house that you'll damage your geckoes, but while they may be able to happily forage at 10 degrees, or happily survive 2 degrees, they can't spend their entire lives at those temperatures. It's not a matter of protecting them from ever getting dangerously cold (that's just a matter of not freezing them), it's a matter of making sure they get the heat they need. They can't spend all of their time at either the lower or upper end of their thermal tolerances, they need time to heat up and digest food, get their higher metabolism going etc, and they also need time at lower temperatures to rest and signal the daily and seasonal cycles etc.

They're quite resilient to temperature extremes - I've often found them under very hot rocks, and as long as they don't freeze solid the cold isn't an issue for them as long as it doesn't last too long. It's not a question of whether or not you need to heat them (I've kept and bred tropical pythons and colubrids indoors without supplying any artificial heat for example, but I lived in the tropics at the time and if I tried that in my home town of Melbourne I'd have a collection of dead pythons and colubrids) - the important thing is to know what temperatures your animal needs, and provide those temperatures.