Since most of the country is suffering from record high temperatures and heatwaves, I thought it would be a good idea to start a thread about how to manage these extreme conditions for your reptiles.
Feel free to post any good advice and useful tips that can be used to help others through these dangerous and challenging times. Please don't post unhelpful or meaningless comments, so that people opening this thread for helpful advice don't have to wade through it to find the good bits.
I'll start with a few practices that I routinely employ for predicted high temperatures:
1) Turn off ALL artificial heat in the room in which animals are kept and in individual enclosures the night before a heatwave. Avoid feeding animals like pythons before heatwaves, as a big food item and very high temperatures can cause complications. If a heatwave catches you unaware and your animals are already digesting a big feed, then reduced or suboptimal temps the night before a heatwave is less likely to cause problems than an overheated bellyful during a heatwave.
2) Freeze big blocks of ice e.g fill ice-cream or tupperware containers with water and put in freezer the night before a heatwave is expected. These blocks can be placed in enclosures in trays to cool the inhabitants.
3) If your reptile room gets too hot for the species you keep*, work out which room in the house (or under the house) is the coolest, and put your animals in there on the floor. (*each species has a different threshold).
4) Cover any windows in the rooms in which you have animals with pale coloured blinds or aluminium foil to reflect the sun's rays.
5) Stay home (if possible) and check on your animals during the day, monitoring temps with thermometers and /or infrared thermometers. Observe body language as well when you do this.
6) Hose down/spray the inside of aviaries and soak pits on the morning of heatwaves.
7) Last but not least, make sure that all animals have fresh drinking water prior to and during heatwaves. Check on this during the day if possible. Providing an additional large, shallow bowl or basin of water for the animal/s to submerge themselves in is also a good idea.
Feel free to post any good advice and useful tips that can be used to help others through these dangerous and challenging times. Please don't post unhelpful or meaningless comments, so that people opening this thread for helpful advice don't have to wade through it to find the good bits.
I'll start with a few practices that I routinely employ for predicted high temperatures:
1) Turn off ALL artificial heat in the room in which animals are kept and in individual enclosures the night before a heatwave. Avoid feeding animals like pythons before heatwaves, as a big food item and very high temperatures can cause complications. If a heatwave catches you unaware and your animals are already digesting a big feed, then reduced or suboptimal temps the night before a heatwave is less likely to cause problems than an overheated bellyful during a heatwave.
2) Freeze big blocks of ice e.g fill ice-cream or tupperware containers with water and put in freezer the night before a heatwave is expected. These blocks can be placed in enclosures in trays to cool the inhabitants.
3) If your reptile room gets too hot for the species you keep*, work out which room in the house (or under the house) is the coolest, and put your animals in there on the floor. (*each species has a different threshold).
4) Cover any windows in the rooms in which you have animals with pale coloured blinds or aluminium foil to reflect the sun's rays.
5) Stay home (if possible) and check on your animals during the day, monitoring temps with thermometers and /or infrared thermometers. Observe body language as well when you do this.
6) Hose down/spray the inside of aviaries and soak pits on the morning of heatwaves.
7) Last but not least, make sure that all animals have fresh drinking water prior to and during heatwaves. Check on this during the day if possible. Providing an additional large, shallow bowl or basin of water for the animal/s to submerge themselves in is also a good idea.
Last edited:
