I have a feeling this will spawn huge debate, but I'm willing to take the gamble. This forum was established by the requests of myself and a few other "gecko forum" regulars, here at kingsnake.com back in 1999 I believe, that kept leos. Over the years, months, weeks, there have always been countless debates regarding substrates and which is best.
First I'll address Breathingbywires...
There's NOTHING wrong with using sand substrate. No one thing. Just so long as you use it in a safe manner. A sand or sandy soil substrate is naturalistic to leos. Their habitat is similar to that of some of our own eye-lid geckos here in the US; rocky with a sandy gravel based substrate. I've been keeping leos on a straight sand substrate since 1997 (got my first leo in Oct 96), when my first leo was old enough and large enough to be on it. I also feed strictly crickets. I've never had a problem with impaction. I have also kept my leos on a straight bed-a-beast substrate with no problems.
Now to address StinaUIUC some, but this also can apply to you Breathingbywires. With the above paragraph in mind, leopard geckos and most other eye-lid geckos are fossorial by nature. Meaning they live under rocks or in borrows underground. In the case of our native banded gecko species, one can usually and extremely easily find them under flat surface rocks 1-2 days after a good rainstorm. When they are not "surface" active (under rocks at least) they are generally in borrows where the relative humidity could be as high as 100%! Leopard geckos fill this same niche within their native lands. So, no, high humidity plus leopard geckos is not necessarily bad.
And as for InsideOutsider13 comment, "You should not use coconut husk for leopard geckos because it is ingestible and is meant to capture moisture for humidity." Young leopard geckos need a cage with higher moisture levels. Their skin is much thinner and they are much smaller than their adult counterparts. Thus making dehydration a very serious concern for such a small animal, regardless if they are a desert/semi-arid species that is adapted to this.
I like StinaUIUC's quote, "-ignorance is not to be punished when one is trying to gain knowledge...what scares me is the vast number of people who, when given the information to gain knowledge, choose to ignore it." The only concrete 100% best way to keep animals is the way Mother Nature does. All we try to do by keeping animals is either replicate their native environments as closely as possible or come up with "lazy" alternatives to housing them (newspaper, paper towel, linoleum, or slate substrate). It's not a matter of ignoring the information given, but rather not gathering enough varied, reliable sources of information, reading them, and digesting them, and then manipulating them to a means that works for you and the animal (the animal more so). That's what I had to do before I got my first leo in 1996. All there was on them back then was REPTILES magazine, and a few misleading or misinformed books. There was no leopard gecko manual (at least not until 1998). Everyone should be so fortunate to have the internet now and to have every an all caresheets on leoaprd geckos or other animals available at their fingertips. Many of us older keepers (not going to use old-time keepers since I'm only 22, but I have been keeping reptiles and amphibians since I can remember) could only have been so fortunate. What you see now in books is the hard work of years and decades of dedicated animal lovers and breeders sharing what works for them, a few friends, or other peers whom shared their experiences. And just because someone reads a book, keeps X amount of animals, or writes a book, doesn't necessarily make them and almighty expert.
Chris
