Rest in peace, (and unfortunatly pieces), my little lizard friend. Two weeks ago durning my 9 day vacation I headed up to Mammoth Pool near Yosimite for some fishing and camping. While I was up there, with the help of my two young cousins distracting it, I managed to catch an elusive tiger whiptail. These lizards are lightning fast, moving the distance of a football field in mere seconds. Was excited to finally have one of these, since I had tried catching them before to no avail. I used a fishing pole with a very loose noose to slip around its next while my cousins scared it where I needed it to be. BAM….

I set up a 10 gallon aquarium as a terrerium with a nice heating rock, some expensive calcium lizard sand for desert type lizards, a water bowl, and some meal worms. Ended up spending about 90 dollars in all to get everything up and ready. The little fella was very attentive, was eating and basking well. Unfortunatly the store was out of lids for the aquariums at the time so I just set up a mesh lid. On Friday I headed up to Pine Flat for another camping trip, and by the time I got home Sunday, I found the terrerium tore up inside, all the sand had been thrown all over the place, and I found about 1/5th of the tail of my lizard. I was pretty upset with the cats, but its my fault for not fully duct taping the lid onto the terrerium. I had even caught a bunch of new friends for the lizard while I was at Pine Flat, which I will talk about in another post.

Monday I found another piece of the tail in the houe, and tuesday my girlfriend called me and told me she had found the lizard in the mouth of my cat, alive. The lizard had managed to get away from the cats, out of the cage, and hide in the house for days. We put it in my new 135gallon aquarium. He was missing almost his entire tail and had a tiny gash on his back. Unfortunatly by wednesday morning he had died. I was amazed he was alive at all still. So it is unfortunate. For the future though, I will have no more issues with the cats due to having a new setup for my lizard. Hopefully in the next month or so I can catch 2 more Tiger Whiptails and try to breed them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 13th, 2006 at 10:05 am and is filed under Cory, Fat Penguin Blog, Nature, Personal, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.