Feeding :

As I’ve mentioned previously, these guys are massive eaters and seem to have a very fast metabolism for reptiles. I feed them little and often, mostly on fruit flies and small crickets – although they won’t bat an eyelid at prey bigger than their head, I tend to feed slightly smaller prey which get dusted with vitamin powder every few feeds. These are ones to watch hunting!

Behaviour :

If you sit and watch these geckos, you will see a lot of interesting body language – a lot of this is through their posture and their tails. An upright, straight legged posture appears to relate to dominance – this cannot be avoided when housing animals in groups, as there will always be dominant and submissive individuals. Submissive animals tend to move slowly with their bodies quite low to the ground. That is until you put food in the tank, then hierarchy seems to go out the window! Tail movements are frequently seen by both sexes, and appear to occur when an animal is nervous (either from my presence or a dominant animal). The waving tail is often followed by a quick dash for cover. I believe this expressive body language is why there appears to be no physical aggression among group members.

Breeding & Hatchling Care

Another great little quirk of Tropiocolotes is that multiple males kept together actually seem to benefit the group. The presence of other males within the group encourages successful mating. When I had one male to several females there was little to no egg laying from the females – now with three males the number of viable eggs has increased dramatically and I now have an incubator full! You can often hear the males calling at night (either to attract the ladies or mark their territory), but I have never seen any evidence of physical fighting and neither have the other keepers I have talked to.

Females lay one egg every few weeks, with no cycling required. The single egg is quite large for the size of the gecko and can quite easily be seen through the belly of the female prior to laying. Females lay in the sand which can either be kept dry or slightly damp. I tend to remove these eggs as other females have a tendency to dig them up when laying their own. The eggs are incubated at around 28c and hatch after a few months. I’m not aware of whether this species is temperature-dependent.

I currently keep both species in the same enclosure and from my observations I do not believe these two species can hybridise. I only have male T. steudneri and in the time of the two species cohabiting none of the T. tripolitanus females have laid.

I’ve found the best way to raise the babies are to keep them with the parents with exactly the same care. From my experience, raising hatchlings on heat mats and away from their own kind results in weak babies who often do not survive.