housing

hey guys, mark here. im in the process of getting another juvenile female, and was wondering if its ok to house 3 (1 male, 2 females)(including the female im getting) dragons in a 90 gallon tank? thanks

You could probably house the two girls in the tank together, as long as they're really close in size and get along. You would have to keep a close eye on them, even if they do appear to get along, to ensure that one of them isn't dominating the other, causing the dominated one to not thrive.

But the boy should definitely be housed alone. If he's housed with the girls, there's a good probability they'll just be gravid and stressed all the time. Not to mention, the males tend to be a little more aggressive than the girls, which, again, means someone's not going to thrive.

If they're really small juvies, you may even want to consider putting them in something smaller, to make catching their prey easier on them.

thanks. but heres my problem, i only have one other tank, and its a 40 gallon breeder, and i already have a male in that one.lol.

How big are these three that we're talking about here? That'll give me some information to go off of for ideas of what to do.

both in the 90 gallon are 12 inches in length. in the 40 gallon breeder he is 13 1/2.

Oh, wow. They're pretty decent sized already. Okay. My suggestion would be to partition off the 90 gallon off at the halfway point. It'd be wise to use something that they can't see through, and that they can't climb, like melamine or something.

You can use silicon adhesive/caulk (or something similar), making sure it's "glued" really, really well in case they jump at it so it won't fall over. Just make sure it comes to the top of the tank, and that their basking spots aren't close to the partition, so they can't jump over it.

The reason I say it this way is that when we first started out, we had a really large tank and two juvie males living in it. I thought I had the partition really well secured (obviously not), and the larger male jumped over it the first time...knocked it down the second time. The first time, he did no harm to the other little male, but the second time, he took a good sized chunk out of the little one's tail. Hard lesson learned.

yeah i gotcha, thanks. but in the 90 gallon where i have the male and female, they get along just great. ive had not one problem out of them. lol i found out real quick when my two males were babys, when i had trouble sexing them, that they were both boys. they started fighting all the time, so i had to get seperate enclosures. so then i got the two tanks i have now, and seperated both of them. then i bought the female and put her in the tank with my male, and no problems at all. not one instance of violence or anythiing. so thats why i was wondering if i threw another female in there if there would be problems. yeah thats horrible to hear that your male lost part of its tail due to that.

Yeah, well, I guess it was beginner's luck that he didn't actually kill the other little guy or something, and that it was only a tail boo-boo.

Understood. I still wouldn't recommend keeping the male with the females simply because they really shouldn't breed until they're about 2 years old, and the male could hit puberty at any time. Unless you're able to watch him 24/7, there is always that chance that he could "get" one of the girls, and that wouldn't be a good thing this early.

We've had several our guys that started wanting to breed at about around this same size, so please just be careful, and separate the male from the females as soon as you can.

ohhh ok. lol before i had the female at all, he would head bob and turn his beard black for no apparent reason, he hasnt done this since getting the female, but could that be a sign?

It's a sign that you've got a little horndog on your hands, yeah!

Head bobbing and black bearding is sometimes followed with more than just head bobbing and black bearding...