My Ctenosaurs

I've been catching Ctenosaura similis in the wild (florida) for several years now and have been raising a wild caught female for 2 years as a pet. (I have been catching them live, not killing them).

I have developed a huge interested in the genus and am in love with their personalities, intelligence, and uniqueness. My adult female is now very tame and is a fantastic educational tool for the talks I give for kids k-12 and also at a collegiate level from time to time.

I have A LOT of experience with C. similis behavior.

Currently have 3 ctenosaurs: 2 similis and 1 quinquecarinata.

Boca, roughly 2 year old female (been in my possession since mid october of 2009 when i caught her as a hatchling).

the day I caught her.



currently (well 2 months ago).

my juvenile, pistol, (most likely male):

colors are no longer gray, mostly brown/orange/yellow like the female


caught mid may of '11

my Q, named ozzy, (most likely male, judging by the femoral pores, but debatable due to the coloration)


found this guy on craigslist for $30, the owner got it at petco and ended up becoming afraid of the little guy because he was skiddish and she handled it with gloves because she thought the tail was dangerous haha



all eating crickets of various sizes, the Q also eats mealworms. fruits and veggies are plentiful. hibiscus when they are available. plenty of wild caught insects (a lot of people shy away from this in the pet trade, but these are wild caught individuals and i've had much better success with health/coloration/behavior when being fed wild insects as a supplement...consequently they are dewormed regularly just in case). Each are house separately, when the C. similis are the same size I will slowly introduce them and maybe get some eggs from the female.

I love the first pic. Did you really expect her to clean her plate? They are beautiful by the way, and I like them too. We just don't see many of those up here in WI.

Heck no! I just wanted to offer her a bunch of different veggie types to figure out what she liked

absolute disaster today.

the smallest c. similis (the juvenile male) ripped a hole in his reptarium while inside my screened in patio (with plants, pool, pavillion, etc, basically its huge). I cannot find the guy anywhere, there is one area (a bend in the aluminum frame of the screen enclosure) where he could escape to the outside world and I'm pretty sure he found it.

I am upset to not only have a pet escape, but even more distraught to know that there is a little invasive lizard running around loose now. I saw a hawk up in a tree, grab something and fly off earlier. As crappy as it sounds to say about a pet, I hope the hawk got him before he did any damage to native species . maybe I will be lucky enough to find him (after all, I did catch him in the wild 3 months ago), but I am doubtful he will be found.


on a GREAT NOTE: the large C. similis (the female) ate two hoppers today with quite a bit of gusto.

Sorry for your loss.

That sucks that you had a escapee. Been there, done that.

If I were in your shoes, I wouldn't worry too terribly about him being invasive. Like you said yourself, that species is already fairly established in Florida, so the damage has been done, in a sense. While of course, I'm not condoning the intentional release of non-natives, in your case, it WAS an accident, and IMHO, its not worth losing too much sleep over.

ON the brighter side, I am always encourage to hear of hobbyists taking an interest in species that are not so mainstream (i.e. green iguanas or bearded dragons, etc). My underyling concern is that a lot of these more over-looked species will gradually not get any attention and at some point, years from now, someone is going to look around and want say, a spiny-tailed iguana and they're not going to be available because no one breeds them in captivity and the govt finally outlawed any import/export of them in some capacity.

GOT HIM! I was feeding my adult ctenosaur about 50 crickets, i dumped some xtras on the bricks for the anoles on my patio. I walk away, 10 minutes later i return to see that little bas***d is eating them in the middle of the patio. I chased him down and got him! I'm very happy, 1 i got my pet back 2 there isnt a little demon lizard terrorizing the neighborhood.

no, the species is only established on 2 islands on the west coast. a mainland population would be terrible


Ctenosaura similis is such a mistunderstood species. Their natural diet, their "untamable" attitude, etc etc is SO misconstrued.

Oh, sorry...You just said in your OP that you were catching them in FL.

field collected 9 live specimens today with a licensed trapper from the state.
keeping 1 adult male. he is absolutely vicious, nearly bit my finger off, but I am gonna need him for research in the future.

here he is and the hatchlings we collected.

in the sunlight he is baby blue/gray and orange/yellow


male top, female bottom.



and the cute ones.

just built this enclosure this weekend




split 50/50, left side for my tamed subadult/adult female, right side for my juvenile (still pissy) male.

I have since added two buld fixtures below each of the shelves in the enclosure to provide light for the bottom half of the cage. I need to swap to some daylight bulbs rather than house bulbs, but other than that it is basically done.