Here’s the open secret about brumation: the sleep itself is the easy part. Your dragon does that on autopilot. The part where keepers actually determine whether brumation goes well or badly is the preparation — the two to three weeks before the long sleep begins. A dragon that enters brumation with a clean bill of…
Brumation has a mythology problem. For every keeper who manages the winter sleep calmly, there’s a forum thread confidently advising something that ranges from useless to genuinely dangerous: crash the temperatures, bathe him daily, babies do it too, never touch him till spring. Bad brumation advice doesn’t just confuse people — it kills dragons, usually…
Here’s a statistic that surprises most keepers: in veterinary studies, roughly 70–85% of sampled bearded dragons carry some kind of internal parasite. The second surprise: most of them are fine. Parasites are background noise in reptile life — the question is never “does my dragon have parasites” but “does the burden need treatment.” That distinction…
Impaction is the most misunderstood emergency in bearded dragon care. Ask the internet and you’ll hear it’s all about sand — but reptile vets report that the most common surgical impactions are food, not substrate: oversized hard chunks and cold basking spots. Impaction is almost always a husbandry problem wearing a digestive disguise. The tool…
Metabolic bone disease is the most common nutritional disease in captive reptiles — and in bearded dragons, it’s almost entirely preventable. Almost every case traces back to the same short list of husbandry gaps: weak or missing UVB, unsupplemented insects, or both. The tragedy of MBD is that it’s a slow-motion disease: by the time…
Here’s the uncomfortable truth about feeder insects: the cricket is not the meal. Whatever the cricket ate in the last day or two is the meal. An ungut-loaded cricket is, in one reptile vet’s memorable phrase, a delivery vehicle with nothing inside. Gut-loading is the practice of feeding your feeders a nutrient-dense diet for 24–72…
Calcium dusting is the most routine thing in bearded dragon care and somehow the most argued-about. How often? With D3 or without? What about multivitamins? Ask five keepers and you’ll get seven schedules. The disagreements aren’t random, though — they trace back to one variable most schedules don’t name: your UVB setup. Answer two questions…
Walk into any reptile expo and you’ll see fifty tubs of wriggling protein, each seller swearing theirs is the best. The truth is less dramatic: there are three genuinely great staple feeders, a handful of useful treats, and a couple of popular options that are quietly terrible. The difference between them isn’t marketing — it’s…
A thermostat is the cheapest life-insurance policy in reptile keeping. Heat sources fail — bulbs surge, CHEs run hot, heat mats develop hot spots — and without a thermostat, the failure mode is a cooked dragon. Every experienced keeper has a story about the thermostat that caught a malfunction at 2 AM. The keepers without…
Every bearded dragon care sheet says “12 hours of light, 12 hours of dark.” It’s not wrong — but it’s the whole story the way “eat food” is a diet plan. Wild dragons live under a sun that shifts with the seasons: 14-hour summer days, 10-hour winter days, and dawn/dusk transitions their bodies use as…
