Galaxy

My Final Lex Post

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For those of you who have been frequent blog visitors or Twitter followers, you’ll know that I occasionally post about my pet crested gecko Lex. Sadly, she passed away this winter. She was only six years old, which is quite young for a crested gecko to die. The species often lives for fifteen to twenty years in captivity and sometimes even longer. In hindsight, I believe she probably got impacted, though at the time I thought she was just going through a bad shed cycle. Impaction is always a small risk when you’re keeping the animal in a planted vivarium and feeding live insects. These choices nevertheless enrich an animal’s life, too, and Lex got clear enjoyment out of the plants and insect feeders. In the end I think it was unfortunately just her time.

Lex was a great gecko and I was really sorry to lose her. Here are some photos I hadn’t yet posted that I’d like to share in celebration of her life with me.

The Sexiest Gecko

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My crested gecko Lex cracks me up. I woke up to this one morning. Tell me this isn’t the most alluring pose you’ve ever seen a gecko perform. For maximum effect, turn on “Bootylicious” by Destiny’s Child while looking at this photo (I included an embed of the song via YouTube below).

More Cute Lex Photos

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My crested gecko Lex has been posing up a storm lately!  Here are a couple of new snaps of her antics.  If you think she looks significantly yellower in the middle photo than the other two, you're correct - and it's not an illusion due to lighting or camera settings.  The white versions are her "fired down" state, while the yellow is a more active coloration; when she's really intensely "fired up," she can actually even reach a medium brown, but that's relatively rare for her.

Lex Shedding

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Usually animals who are in the process of shedding are quite shy, so I haven't seen Lex shed in quite a while (when she was a baby I saw bits of it as very juvenile crested geckos have a harder time getting their shed off).  But last night, she popped up with a superhero mask and cape of her own dead skin.

I assumed her surprisingly social behavior was a request for more humidity to aid in the detaching and easy consumption of her shed, so after taking her photo I spritzed her and watched as she ate it all within the next half hour.

Lex Being Adorable

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My crested gecko Lex's home is a planted vivarium, and I somewhat regularly switch out the plants depending on what thrives, what she likes to interact with, what is available for a good price, and so on.  Quite a few months ago, I put a small Dracaena (I think perhaps Dracaena compacta but I'm not 100% certain) in her tank.  Lex is always suspicious of new tank additions, so while I know she acclimated enough to tolerate being around it some time ago, she's now finally decided it's actually trustworthy and quite comfy to boot; here's a few shots of her latest sleeping position.  Crested geckos are nocturnal so she mostly sleeps during the daytime; they also don't have eyelids so while she looks to be awake in these photos, she is really either fully asleep or drowsily wondering what I'm doing poking a camera lens in her face.