Hey! Need Your Advice

Hey! thank u for reading this. My boyfriend is just now getting into reptiles because ive had several. He has this idea that he wants to get this really big aquarium and have a water side and a land side. He wants to put different reptiles in it...frogs,hermit crabs,lizards. Since ive had lizards I know putting all those things together proabably isnt possible lol. I wanted to know though is there ANY reptile that can be housed with a different kind . Ive seen water dragons,frogs, and chamelians together. That was at a petstore so I didnt want to go off that..knowing pet stores usually do the complete wrong things where I live. Also wondering if you can put hermit crabs in a aquarium with other lizards? on the water side of the tank my boyfriend wants to put some small fish in there. I used to know someone with a water dragon who had a land and water side and it worked very well. I just wanted to get ur opinion on all of this! any advice would be really appreciated and if you house ur lizards with other lizards id love to know about ur experience. Thanks !

housing different species of lizards is not the best idea. Normally all species found come from different parts of the worlds as others. Even the ones that come from the same region are prey to the others.

Hey thanks for your reply I appreciate it. I have heard you definatly cant mix certain animals. Ive heard of people doing it though thats why I wanted to see if it was safe. Ive heard of Basilisks (dont know how to spell) and water dragons together. Have u heard of this? Can it work by any chance? any more advice..info..or experience is apreciated!

any meat eating animal, like water dragons will at some point try to eat other cagemates besides other water dragons. EVEN then you have to house same species within certain guidelines to assure that they wont eat one another.

I have heard stories and people talk about housing species togather, but i have also heard some horror stories too. Like somone housed a water dragon and a iguana togather and the water dragon bit its tail severly, this same person also put a baby beaded dragon with its parent. The parent almost killed it's kid, because it was wanting to eat it.

Reptiles, despite what alot of people want to believe are not social creatures. They do not need to have friends to be happy, quite the opposite of this makes them happy. Other animals in one tank only add to the stress of them, because its not a new friend, but another competitor for their food.

Petstores and ignorance teaches that you can mix species without VISABLE problems. THESE people normally do not care to understand about internal problems, such as parisites and diseases. Normally one specie can carry a disease that does not affect it visably, but can kill tankmates, that were not able to cope with a foriegn illness.

I would like to offer another opinion.

I think that there is a general misconception about the mixing of species in a vivarium setting. Properly chosen, there are a variety of species which can be put together, in the right environment. For instance, you can mix species of rhacs of similar size, with certain species of skinks and millipedes all in the same vivarium. There are probably similar projects you could go with, as long as you could offer them suitable habitat, so they can thrive and not get in each others way.

There is a really good article on this in the "Rhacodayctlus" book written by DeVosjoli. Besides the great pictures, it has an awesome article on this very subject.