rept. mag. april , leopard gecko sub species

In the new reptiles mag. under Herpetological queries , someone writes in asking about , leopard lines, is there only on king of leopard gecko? something like that, i never really thought about it , but it turns out that there are at least four species and several sub-species sharing the genus as the common leopard gecko. they say that it is possible that the geckos we keep are most likely a mixture of several subspecies or even species . it says look out for new names prefixing leopard geckos being imported in the future.

its a good read, but maybe this is an attempt to hype the gecko industry? i mean their are defiantly different species and sub species of leos, but are they different from what has been imported in the past, back then they probly didn't care about giving them a different lable, but now, everyone will be running after Turkish leos , or what ever they may call the different ones. just thought this could spark some conversation. I thought it was interesting because I didnt even know about any other sub-species.

In any case it made it sound like their will be a stock of import leos comming in some time soon.

A LOT of leopard geckos in the US are a mix of multiple subspecies. For a while (mainly when they were being imported), basically no one differentiated between them.

Now I think it would be damn near impossible to figure out exactly which subspecies each leo is because of the enormous amount of captive breeding.

I agree. I think the last time I was able to buy a wild caught leo was 4 years or so back. I bought a couple wild caught females which I should have held onto but I had no idea of their age so I sold them. I think one of them may have been responsible for the "stripe lavender albino" --of course it never occured to me till after I sold them!

wow is that one a baby right now? if not do you have updated pics?

I wonder if imports will be expencive or cheap? im sure every breeder will want to get at least a few.

You really don't wanna know... but I'll tell yah anyways. This baby was hatched about 3 months before I moved from Minneapolis to Phoenix. When we got down here our house hadn't been finished yet so we had to live in a hotel room for a month... with about 150 reptiles and 2 birds! Long story short... I lost about 15 geckos total and this one was the last one to go. Unfortunately this is the only pic I have. The dark coloration is lavender (this pic was literally right out of the egg) and the rest of the gecko was basically colorless.

wow between that and selling off the parents, it just wasnt ment to be.

Trust me, between the house not being done on time, the gecko(s) dying, and several other things that messed with me and my wifes life at that time we had quickly reached the conclusion moving here was not the best idea!

Wow Gene, that about takes the cake for the ultimate " I'd like to see that one as an adult ". In the early to mid 90s I used to help a few friends who imported hundreds and hundreds and more leopards, but never saw anything really special like that. There were a few that were huge, probably 100 grams with skinny tails, big enough to leave a permanent scar. Let me guess... the average looking ones did just fine, right ? That's usually how it goes.

Oh yeah, in '95 - '96 we were getting 6 bucks apiece for the imports, they were almost all dull beige with tons of spots. Denise, who llater started The Golden Gecko used to cherry pick the shipments, her stock had alot of F2, F3 wild blood.

All my WC girls were very melanistic. They weren't high, hypo, or anything special looking but they obviously were hiding something special in their jeans. I mean genes.