How to Take Care of Bearded Dragons

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Tim Cole I'm with the Austin Reptile Service. And I've been keeping reptiles and amphibians for over forty years. I'm here to talk to you about keeping bearded dragons. Bearded dragons are one of the more popular lizards for pets, and there's a good reason for that. They don't get too large, they average about fifteen, sixteen inches. And now a days they even come in a variety of colors, basically most of them are brown and gray. But you can get variations of yellow or orange, greenish colors and they just make really good lizard pets. Because they're very calm, they're fairly easy to take care of if you set them up properly, they tolerate being handled, and they don't get excited too easily. Originally they came from Australia, but now there's a lot of people in the US that breed these for pets. They are omnivores, when they're babies they start off on small crickets and usually within a few weeks they'll even start feeding on different salad mixes. You want to make sure that you supplement their food with calcium, you put them on full spectrum UV light, you give them heat lamp or heat source, they do require a very warm basking area. One hundred, one hundred ten degrees is perfectly fine for them. Keep in mind their cage has to big enough so they can thermal regulate. They need to be able to go from upper seventies, low eighties to basking temperature of one hundred, one hundred and ten. For this reason you do have to set them up properly, but as long as you do this and you proper husbandry with them they'll live quite a while. Females average about five years if they're being bred, males can be double that. I've got a male now that twelve years old and he's still active and going out and doing our educational programs and birthday parties."