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Sylvia Explores Her New Home – Leopard Gecko Tank Setup

By Solid Gold Aquatics on

Jennifer:
Hey guys, it's Jenny. Welcome back once again to Solid Gold. Today I'm out here in the fish room/animal room at this point, really, with Sylvia because today I'm going to be setting up Sylvia's new enclosure and putting her in it, and I'll take you guys along for the ride.

This is Sylvia. I get a lot of questions about what color morph she is. She is called a tangerine. I got her from Gecko Daddy about three years ago. She's very, very feisty. She definitely has a big personality and a mind of her own. It's very, very cute.

Unfortunately, you can't see her colors as well as you usually could right now because she's actually about to shed in a few days. Her skin is peeling away. Her old layer of skin is peeling away and making her color look a little bit dusty. She's this bright, yellowish orange with an orange tail right here, and then, she's got a black and white polka dotted tail at the end. She's beautiful and I just really love her.

I'm excited because this will be giving her a little bit of a space upgrade. She was in a pretty big take before. She was in an Exo Terra medium-low size. That's a pretty good size tank for a leopard gecko. Honestly, it's probably the minimum tank size that I would be comfortable with for a leopard gecko. Just after having them for a little while now, I know how much they do like to explore at night time. I would hate to have them in anything smaller than that if I didn't absolutely have to. I used to have her cage in my bedroom with me. When I was sleeping, she would sometimes wake me up with a little scratching noises of her little claws on the background and the fake plants as she was trying to crawl up them.

Also, whenever I've had to come out here to the fish room late at night because I left something out here, and I turn on the lights, and she freezes wherever she was, I can see that she's been out exploring in her cage. She really likes to explore which is why I'm happy to be giving her a little bit of a bigger tank, a little bit of a tank upgrade today for you Sylvia. It's probably about one and a half times the size of her current cage that she been in.

In my last leopard gecko video, when I showed how I was setting up Rune's tank, I did not include a thermostat for the heat mat, and a few of you guys pointed out that I should look into using one. I just want to say thank you guys for pointing that out to me. I'm always constantly learning new things about the pets that I love so much every day.

Honestly, just having a thermostat on the heat mat for some reason isn't something that crossed my mind or came up when I was doing research about how to set up a good leopard gecko tank over all these years. I don't know. I don't know how, but it's one of those things that never came up. Thank you guys for letting me know about that. I now have one set up for both of their tanks so they're not going to overheat. Right, Sylvia? She's like, "I don't really care." [laughs]

Sylvia is getting a little antsy. I'm going to go put her back in her Exo Terra cage, right now, while we set up her new enclosure. Are you ready for this, girl? Your mind is going to be blown, I'm telling you. Back you go. She always gets so antsy to get back in there, she just jumps off of me. This is her cage now, might as well do it before. She's got reptile carpet for the substrate. I have a few sanitized leaves from my pesticide-free yard sitting in here just for a difference in texture for her for walking around. She's got her water dish, her moist hide, little fake plant for some cover, her warm, dry hide.

I've gotten really lucky with my leopard geckos. I don't know if you guys have had the same experience or not, but they always want to go to the bathroom in the same spot. Luckily, all I have to do is find out where their spot is, that they have chosen, and then put a paper towel down over it, and they always go on the paper towel. You guys have seen my rack of six terrariums already. Not all of them are completed and put on here yet. The rest of them that still need to go up there are all sitting here on the floor, currently being worked on and currently installing backgrounds for those ones.

This one here is the one we just completed a couple of weeks ago for Rune, my other leopard gecko. He's doing really well in here by the way, just a quick little update about this. He has decided to kick out all of the substrate that's in the hide and put it right at the front. He burrowed himself in there, really cool. I was excited to see how my leopard geckos would interact with having a loose substrate, and it's been really neat to see so far.

That's Rune's cage, and then, right next to it is going to be Sylvia's cage. I already installed her background on this cage a couple of nights ago. This is an Aquadecor background. It's a little hard to see with how the lights come through the mesh lid right there, but I think it looks really realistic and really pretty. Of course, as you guys know, these are the cages that are made by customcages.com. They make these reptile tanks, and then they also, with their sister company Custom Aquariums, make the amphibious tanks and the aquariums.

The amphibious tanks are the ones here that hold water on the bottom, and I'm using those for my poison dart frogs. Oh, hey, look at you. The setup of Sylvia's tank is going to be pretty much identical to that of Rune's tank. You guys already saw the setup of that tank in a previous video. If you guys missed it, I'll put a link over this video and in the description section down below for you to check out that so you can get a little bit more explanation in detail. In this video, since I already explained how to set up a leopard gecko tank recently, I don't want to be redundant so I'm not going to go too much into explanations. Yes, you guys can check out that video if you want more details, if you want the deets.

The first thing I got to do for the setup of Sylvia's new tank is plug in her heat mat. Her heat mat is already stuck to the bottom of the tank. It's situated over here on this side of the tank. On Rune's cage, I situated his heat mat, if you guys remember, on this side of his tank. That way, all the heat would be centralized right in the middle of this shelf of two tanks and it wouldn't be over on that side of this tank and over on the other side of that tank and then heating the middle as well.

Let's just go ahead and start setting this up. The first thing I'm going to do is add the substrate. For the substrate, just like in Rune's tank, I'm using Eco Earth, which is a ground-up coco fiber. I have it in these baking dishes because, after I added water to it, I was drying it in the sun, just going to spread it out evenly throughout her whole cage. Some of that Eco Earth is still just a tiny bit moist, but that's actually going to get dried up really, really fast, especially with this heat mat coming on pretty soon here because I've noticed that the Eco Earth in Rune's tank is really, really dry. It's like bone dry. Look at that.

Just like with Rune's tank, as you guys saw in the last video, I have a succulent planter with some actual live succulents in it. I've actually never had live plants before in a leopard gecko tank and my track record with live plants is a little mixed, but at the very least it can look pretty for a while until I manage to kill off the plants. Yes, I'm not the greatest with plants, but these are gorgeous. I really hope they make it. I think Sylvia will find it interesting. It's even tall enough where she can crawl under it. I think that'll be a really interesting piece of decor in her tank. If you guys are wondering where I got these log planters, I'll put a link to them in the description section down below to where I found them on Amazon. I think they're really cool.

This is Sylvia's moist hide from the cage that she's living in now, so it's going to smell like her and smell familiar like home. Hopefully, it'll make her feel comfortable sooner in her new environment here. I'm also taking her warm, dry hide from the cage that she's living in currently, just another way that she'll feel at home. We're keeping her water dish the same too. I have these extra rocks too from when my pond was being built.

Sylvia loves climbing all over these and she also really likes when they get heated up because sometimes I use a ceramic heat emitter just for a couple of hours a day over their tanks and it heats up the rocks and she loves laying on the nice hot rocks. I can't take that away from her either. I’ve got to put these in here somewhere. I'm also including some sanitized leaf litter from my yard because I love just being able to give my leopard geckos a different texture to walk on. I think it's really enriching for them if they have multiple different textures so they can feel underfoot. Just a little touch that I like to do that, I think they appreciate, but maybe it's in my head. I don't think I'll ever know [laughs].

There we have it. There's Sylvia's new tank. It's kind of hard to see with the glass doors in the way, but we've got her warm hide. We've got some decorative elements in there, got a couple of different substrates for her to feel underfoot, her moist hide over there, and her water dish on the cool side as well. With that, it's all ready for her. Let's put her in there and see what she thinks.

Ready Sylvia? You have got just an empty cage in here now, huh? And you're wondering what the heck is going on, I'm sure. Come on. All right, Sylvia, you're sitting on my hand really awkwardly, but say goodbye to your old cage.

Well, Sylvia explored for a little bit, she checked out both of her hides, and now she's just chilling in her warm hide. I think I'm going to try feeding her some crickets and see if she's ready to yet in her new home.

We'd better see if Rune will eat too. Sometimes he's little more finicky and he won't eat during the day, so if he doesn't eat right now, I'll just come back later tonight and feed him then. There he goes. Good job, Rune. I'll leave her alone for now. I really think she loved her new home, so I'm really happy. Sylvia is more and more just becoming my little buddy, it's so cute. I love her so much. Her personality is just like 100 all the time, I hope you guys can see that a little bit in the video.

She's just a little spunky girl. If you liked anything that I used in Sylvia's tank build and you want to find it and use it for your own leopard geckos at home, I'll try to find links for everything that I can and include it down in the description section down below, so you guys can get some of these items too if you liked them. Thank you so much for watching, I'll see you next time and, until then, stay gold.

About Solid Gold Aquatics

Jennie’s fish house is outfitted with Custom Aquariums rack systems that include standard glass aquariums for her fish collection, amphibious tanks set up a bioactive vivariums, and Custom Cages Hybrid H2 reptile enclosures.

"I'm Jennifer Lynx and Solid Gold is about goldfish and all the other pets in my life - aquatic or not! Fancy goldfish have long been the main subject of my channel, but as an animal lover I have many other pets that I make videos about too. Here you'll find goldfish, discus, plecos, other aquarium fish, axolotls, poison dart frogs, leopard geckos, rabbits, cats, and more. Subscribe to see new videos about them every week!"

Jennie's mission is about promoting the goldfish hobby and inspiring better goldfish-keeping practices.

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