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 #2071286

 What kind of Lighting?

Hey Soo, I know how much you enjoy talking to me, so coming from me this might not hit home....
But I must tell you that you should NOT take anything said or posted in these forums as hostile or MEAN against you. Nearly everything posted here is a typed out form of information and opinions from a group of collective pet keepers to other pet keepers in order to HELP those and all pet’s and their keepers!!! No one in here is trying to argue, fight, hurt, disrespect, or be ENEMIES with anyone else here. You should already know by now I’m the meanest person here and everything I say is normally out of sarcasm, which you’ll understand better as you get older. You should also know that when I was being what you call mean in the past, it was really just me attempting to discourage misinformation and/or mistreatment of pets.

You should also know everyone signing on to these forums repetitively, like Jared and greatballz, are only here to contribute and HELP people who need help. They rarely even ask questions unless they are asking each other about opinions on things. Why would you think Jared would even CARE to argue in a forum, as an Adult and knowing he is an Adult, I’m very sure he has better things to do with his time than sit around and argue with anyone, much less kids on internet forums.

Jared and I, have recognized you and your pet as someones who needs help, based completely on the information you provided. Nothing comes from meanness or hostility.


Soo, I am a petsmart shopper, and I am someone who regularly researches products before dedicating ANY money to them, I recommend you do this as well. I can tell you literally HALF of the things SOLD for reptiles at petsmart are nationally/Globally marketed Reptile-Generic products and they CAN BE VERY HARMFUL TO FENCE LIZARDS, especially when not used properly. Calcium sand is an example that came up recently within these forums. It is sold LABELED as "Ideal for any reptile", yet it can lead to Serious and/or fatal complications in many types of lizards including fence lizards.

Why do they lie, why is it Lying on the label?? -- For the same reason Obama lies openly and blatantly to us - To get you to buy it. They want you to buy their products, so they put whatever it takes to get you to buy it on the package. There are a few organizations set up for rating and approving reptile products, but these organizations are NOT required by any US law. There is nothing, legally that prevents a company from marketing and selling a product that can kill your lizard. The only thing that keeps manufacturers from making these BAD and Deathly products is the need for repeat customers. As in, if you buy something that kills your pet, you would probably stop buying that thing in the future. If everyone did this, a company would never make money and go bankrupt.

For many reasons the companies have found it more profitable to find a middle-line between deadly products and repeat customers. As we all know, America’s unofficial motto is ’profit over people’. So they makes things that are only harmful, but not fatal to reptile pets. They manufacture products that are only fatal to half of the lizards kept as pets, market them for all pets, & then if they are questioned about the product flaws, the companies site studies that used the lizards their products don’t harm or kill.

Ok, I’m done with that, now on to HELPING you...


Soo, you should also KNOW that Glass and Plastic filter OUT UVA and UVB rays from the sun. Any light that shines THROUGH the glass or plastic reflects the UV rays back out in the opposite direction & only lets the majority of visible light pass. UV rays are not part of the humans visible light spectrum, so they don’t pass through plastic. UV rays don’t turn corners any more than light itself does, you know because shadows exist that light doesn’t easily turn corners. So if it has vents in the side of the top, the ONLY UV exposure you get is the small amount of light combined with UV light that shines through that little vent. Your lizard would have to go and sit in that particular beam of light in order to receive a fraction of the UVB rays it needs to live. I doubt your lizard climbs and sits at the vents more than 6 hours a day.

You should also be cautious about putting an enclosure in a window with a lot of sunlight exposure. Many enclosures, especially glass ones, can intensify the heat & dehydrate your pets. Before I got a heat lamp, I sat my enclosure in a window that only got a couple hours of sunlight a day, for temperature reasons. I had to monitor the temperature in the cage every 30 minutes or so during the hours of direct sunlight, and on seriously hot days with constant sunlight I often had to close the blinds.

Jared, I don’t think money and affording things is the problem with her. I think it’s just that she isn’t getting the right things with the money she has. A critter keeper is fairly expensive for what it is... While we all know a tank or proper wire screening is a much better enclosure for a fence lizard.


Soo, basically what we are telling you is your lizard, Winky i think, needs a tank that allows room for a proper UVB light to be mounted or attached across the top of it without ANY piece of plastic OR ANY piece of glass in between the light and your lizard(s). A Lizard’s keeper has to buy a proper fitting light that directly depends on the size of the enclosure it’s being used for. You are using an enclosure that is about half the size recommended for an adult eastern fence lizard, plus Winky is the slightly larger western fence lizard.

I would recommend you figure out a way to have the SUNlight shine directly onto Winky, not through any plastic part of your keeper. The light needs to go through the screen with the window open without a top on the keeper in order for your lizard to live. I give this advice as what to do until you can get a proper light for your enclosure and a proper enclosure for your pet, and the sooner you can do that the better.

We are all friends in these forum, some of us just don’t know it.

 #2071287

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 #2071337

 What kind of Lighting?

They know a lot, but most are misinformed. The only one’s that are reliable for any information on reptiles are few employees that own reptiles themselves. Just as employees, they are supposed to know what the products and what product descriptions are & if you read my earlier post you would know many product descriptions are lies. So the petsmart people are inadvertently giving out lies that they don’t know are lies. I had to warn a petsmart employee in Charlotte about USING A HEATROCK for her captured fence lizard, she had had it for over 4 months with a constant heatrock in a 10 gallon tank...

I can PROMISE YOU they don’t know EVERYTHING
...They are only knowledgeable about the GOOD things about the products they sell, which are occasionally lies... This is the main reason I and many people are in this forum to begin with.

Petsmart Issue # 1

Petsmart Issue # 2

Petsmart Issue # 3

Petsmart Issue # 4

Petsmart Issue # 5

Petsmart Issue # 6

Petsmart Issue # 7

Petsmart Issue # 8

Petsmart Issue # 9

Petsmart Issue # 10

Petsmart Issue # 11

 #2071443

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 #2071447

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 #2071448

 What kind of Lighting?

OH SWEET!! Yea, you’ve done your research & you know where to shop. That’s great & that’s what I was telling you to do. Your local petsmart sounds like a good one. I was just warning you of something you obviously already know, simply that MANY PET SHOP employees are MISinformed. You have found this out on your own and I am glad for that, Yay Soo! From the way you sounded

Quote:

I’ll just ask the Petsmart people They know EVERYTHING

I just skipped over the "at my local one" part and assumed you were blindly trusting the first store you went to.

I included #5 because I know they aren’t all bad. As I stated, I get MY crickets and pet supplies from petsmart for the most part, after I do my research. The store near my hometown is great, there are three girls who work there that I’ve come to know who often are at the cricket booth. They give me reliable information and discourage a lot of Petsmart’s own products because they actually know how to care for reptiles. They also all own reptiles themselves, and own or have owned lizards in the past. On a sidenote, one of them is banging h.... uhh, really pretty... .

If you know the people at your store are reliable then ask them and talk to them about why. I still normally go back home and look up more information on advice I get before spending more than a few bucks on anything.

 #2071662

 What kind of Lighting?

Thanks for being so kind! Yes your PetSmart seems as great as MY local one. It’s just that my local one needs to fix their filters for the fish so it will take about 4 more months for them to get fish again... Which started in March. It’ll take like a year! Uh!!!

Quote:

On a sidenote, one of them banging h... uhh, really pretty... .

I know the quote is not exactly what you said but thats funny (OF COURSE IN A GOOD WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!) lol! Well, I couldn’t buy my bulb yesterday cause we thought our house cleaning would be easier than we thought... so we WERE planning to go today but I missed school cuz im sick... lol. And besides I didn’t get enough info...

 #2071806

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 #2072283

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yeah were getting a bigger sterlite tub when he gets bigger. like a 80 quart. thanks but if I leave the cage open he will for sure escape cuz i have seen his jumping skills. lol. I will probably not put it 10 inches away ill possibly put it exactly on the lid. So no basking light? ok. Thanks.

 #2072612

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 #2073917

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Hey guys! Today I got my bulb! Its a 60 watt- All Living Things basking light with UVA. He loves it! I know its a basking lamp, but its a UVA. Thank you guys for your help!

 #2073987

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 #2075150

 What kind of Lighting?

UVB IS A MUST!!!! UVA is NOT a must!!! UVA is just a recommendation to make things look more normal and food more attractive to our pets. If you look at all my earlier posts, and most all of Jared’s, we tell you a UVB is a must. To buy a UVB if you can only buy one light.

Soo, go learn everything you can about the light spectrum!! I’m not saying you don’t already know this, but for all those that don’t... Light is really just energy we can see reflect off things with these crazy things called eyes. The reason something appears GREEN to us isn’t because it’s giving off green light, it’s GREEN because it’s absorbing all the light from our visible spectrum that’s hitting it except the green light. The green is reflected outwards and we transfer those patterns of energy wavelengths going into our eyes into a picture in our heads. If we designed a bulb that’s glass filtered out all green light everything that was green would look black in the light given off by that bulb!!
Lots of energy comes from the sun, but we can only see the energy at specific levels of fluctuation, called wavelengths. most of the UVA spectrum is part of the Human’s visible light spectrum, and it’s everywhere. We cannot, however, see UVB spectrum light. It’s invisible to us. Fence lizards can see all of UVB and UVA spectrum light.

All lights produce UVA. The lights in your living room, in your kitchen, in your front yard all produce UVA spectrum light. UVB is more harmful to humans, that’s why we designed glass and plastic to filter out the UVB spectrum of light energy. The majority of UVA from the sun does penetrate and shine right through through windows or screens. Technically UVB lights generally produce as much of or more UVA spectrum light than UVA light bulbs themselves do. REAL Black-lights are a large portion of the UVB spectrum, use one if you have to.

You DID NOT WASTE MONEY getting the UVA spectrum light, you just should have gotten the UVB light first or only the UVB light if you can only get one and use the UVB in combination with a household light. most herps and lizards, namely fence lizards need UVB spectrum specific lighting much more than they need UVA. Not because UVA lights aren’t good for them, but because UVA lights DON’T HELP MUCH IN metabolizing Vitamin D3 and because UVA is already all over your house. The UVA light you bought is reptile specific, which means its been "color corrected" for their eyes.

**VERY IMPORTANT**
Your lizard(s) must have UVB light energy to avoid metabolic bone disease, which will kill it. UVB is the only way, the only spectrum that allows lizards to transfer the Vitamin D that a lizard has EATEN as a part of its diet into SYSTEMIC VITAMIN D3, which is needed for bone development and needed to utilize the calcium eaten in its diet. Systemic D3 is something every human needs to live as well. Lizards, like humans, cannot directly eat and process Vitamin D into systemic D3 without UV light exposure. Lizards can only process the vitamin D3 they need from the combination of vitamin D or D3 AND calcium AND EXTENDED UVB EXPOSURE. The majority of calcium your pet needs is already in crickets, but vitamin D is technically low in crickets if your pet is not getting a lot (hours a day) of Direct Sun-Light Exposure, direct meaning no glass or plastic. Extended exposure is made very difficult in your case because humans have designed glass and plastic to filter out as much UVB light as possible, which makes covers and windows a VERY BAD THING. This SYSTEMIC D3 is what most animals use to keep their bone’s mass and density up and healthy. Humans have been created or evolved, or both in my opinion, to need VERY SMALL amounts of UV exposure to perform the same process. While Lizards need A LOT of UVB and UVA exposure for the process......................................................................................................... as Kaplan says "UVB(290-320 NM), of course, is critical for the formation of the chemical which ultimately is transformed by the animal’s body into vitamin D3. D3, as the articles on calcium and metabolic bone disease tell us, is critical for the proper uptake and metabolization of calcium in the body." (Site Reference)

I can answer most of your questions by quoting the words of Melissa Kaplan...

"The problems with truth in advertising goes beyond the misleading use of the term "full-spectrum". When it comes to UVB-producing fluorescents, the percentages given are not particularly useful as the manufacturers rarely tell you what that is a percentage of. If you have a light producing, for example, 20% of its total wavelengths in the UV range, and of that 10% is in the needed UVB range, while another light produces 40% of its wavelengths in the UV range, with 6 percent of that in the UVB needed range, the product with 6% of the 40% is going to produce more UVB in the needed UVB range than the other product. The product with "10%" on the package may look like the better light than the one that says "6%", but it isn’t if that "10%" isn’t providing enough UVB for your reptile.

Metabolic bone disease (MBD) is an umbrella term that covers a number of disorders related to the weakening of the bone or impaired systems function caused by an imbalance in vitamin D3, calcium and phosphorus. This imbalance may be caused by a lack of or too much of one of these three essential elements or the failure to provide one or more of them in a bioavailable form....Quite simply stated, vitamin D3 (dietary or derived from exposure to ultraviolet B), calcium (dietary and matter recycled from the bone matrix) and phosphorus (dietary) interact together to perform a number of functions besides bone growth and maintenance, including muscle contractions and blood coagulation. The result is a well-functioning system, with calcium restored to and, in the case of growing animals, added to the bone matrix. Too much phosphorus can throw this process off, as can too much or too little vitamin D3 or too little access to ultraviolet B wavelengths. As the dangers of calcium deficiency become more widely known, there is increased risk that pet owners may add too much calcium to their reptile’s diet. This results in hypercalcemia, a condition as fraught with peril as is hypocalcemia. To date, however, hypercalcemia is quite rare, occurring most often in healthy gravid iguanas in which such a state is desirable for the health of the female and the developing embryos (see the article on dystocia).

Humans and reptiles alike see into the visible light range (400-700 nanometers). Reptiles and many other animals (but not humans) can also see into the UVA range (320-400 nm). UVB producing lights also produce UVA. UVA subtly affects the way things look to a reptile, from the color of their food to the color of their bodies. To us, male anole dewlaps look reddish - to another anole with sufficient UVA, however, they are brilliant, radiating, flaring red. The tongue of a blue-tongue skinks looks, to us, like the skink has been eating a basket of blueberries. To another blue-tongue skink, however, the tongue is a bright, fluorescent, day-glo pink. Failure to provide UVA to diurnal reptiles can causes subtle stress by altering the reptile’s perception of its universe and how it responds to it. This can be crucial if you are thinking about breeding them or keeping them around for the length of their natural lifespan...

The only difference between the incandescent bulbs you buy in your grocery or hardware store and the more expensive incandescent bulbs marketed for reptiles at the pet stores (besides the price tag!) is that some of the reptile bulbs have been "color corrected" to remove the yellow wavelengths; all this does is alter the apparent of the reptile to you, and will affect slightly how the reptile perceives its environment. However, when using a **household incandescent in conjunction with a *!*UVB-producing fluorescent*!*, yellow wavelengths will be provided and, more importantly, UVA, into which spectrum many reptiles can see.

D3 is formed naturally in the body through exposure to UVB wavelengths (290-320 namometer, or nm). These wavelengths are produced by the sun, but are filtered out by regular glass and plastic; even fine-mesh screen can filter out significant amounts. (The windows in our house block out the UV wavelengths - otherwise all fabrics within range of the window would fade out within just a few years. Glass used in constructing commercial aquariums/terrariums is also made from plain window glass.) Thus an animal needs to be exposed to direct sunlight. It doesn’t take much for an organism to get the amount of UV needed to metabolize adequate amounts of D3 when (again, this bears repeating), the environment and diet are right. Human needs are satisfied by 45 minutes exposure to the sun a week. Reptile veterinarian and researcher Dr. Alison Alberts states that 30 minutes exposure to the sun a day is sufficient for green iguanas.

Carnivorous and omnivorous animals get D3 not only by their body manufacturing it through exposure to sunlight (even nocturnal snakes come out at dusk to bask a bit), but through eating healthy prey. Prey that is not healthy, prey that is fed a marginal diet or one lacking in proper nutrition, or is composed of old or sick animals, will result in malnutrition, including adversely impacting the predator’s ability to properly metabolize and process the nutrients its digestive system extracted from the prey.

Plants, however, do not contain D3, cholecalciferol. Plants contain D2, ergocalciferol. Ergocalciferol has been found to be much less efficient in calcium metabolism than cholecalciferol. Herbivorous reptiles maintained on plant diets who are not given adequate amounts of UVB were found to develop MBD. Since no one knows how much D3 an herbivorous reptile needs, it can be a dangerous proposition to rely on supplementing D3 through use of oral vitamins. How much is enough? How much is too much? Unfortunately, more is not better. Too much D3 causes the same thing as not enough D3 - metabolic bone disease. How then can we assure that our herbivores and omnivores are getting adequate D3, but not too much?

As discussed above, UVB interacts with the skin to form previtamin D. This is then converted in the body, through the function of several organs, into D3. Thus herbivores are able to manufacture their own D3.

UVB (290-320 NM), of course, is critical for the formation of the chemical which ultimately is transformed by the animal’s body into vitamin D3. D3, as the articles on calcium and metabolic bone disease tell us, is critical for the proper uptake and metabolization of calcium in the body."


**BACK TO ME TALKING AGAIN**
Melissa Kaplan’s Herps: Captive Environment - Jared, it’s not as easy to search through when seeking specific information, but the information is more specific, detailed, and backed by an accredited researcher with undergrads in biology and going for a masters in teaching. I sound like a marketer, but i have to say it’s grown ten-fold over the years from the official Reptile and Amphibian Forum on AOL and was for a time run on Sonoma State University’s website. Kaplan’s site is truly the most complete technical guide to any herps and reptiles one could ever own - all available online.

There are FIVE articles on lighting and heating alone and many other articles on Calcium and D3 requirements, and this is where I got all of the quoted information above.


So Jared, your answers led me to a question for you. I assumed you knew that because of the usual lack of power of UVB lighting when compared to the sun, that crickets are supposed to be dusted so lizards have more Phosphorus, Vitamin D, and Calcium in their system and therefore more chance to process it into Systemic D3. Powdering your crickets CANNOT REPLACE a UVB light. Powdering your crickets once a week or so AND used in combination with UVB lighting ensures that pet lizards have the same CHANCEs to get their bone mass and density up as a lizard that is able to bask in the sunlight has.

I’ll answer your technical question on overexposure after Soo decides to buy a UVB light, and not slowly kill her pet. There ARE possibilities for negative consequences of too much UVB light exposure as well as calcium and Vitamin D overdosing. Also, all of these possibilities are described in Kaplans site.

Soo & Jared, I recommend at least reading the articles...

Identification and treatment of metabolic bone disease
Lighting and heating for reptiles
Catch the Wave
Musings on D3 and UV...

 #2077266

 What kind of Lighting?