Thanks, Stacey. Hi everyone, thanks for joining tonight. I'm hoping to get everything important you need to know about Bearded Dragons into a one hour webinar.
Easier said than done, but I'm going to try and cover a bit of background information about them, why they're popular as pets, what kind of people keep them, and how that's relevant to us as clinicians and vets and vet nurses. And then go into a bit more detail on kind of trying to get down to the bottom of how to keep them best, how to feed them best, why hospital and nutrition really contributes to disease, and what kind of typical presentations you're going to see in practise, and hopefully give you a bit more confidence, when you do have a bearded dragon, on the consult table in front of you. So, bearded dragons, I always describe as kind of the, the dog of the reptile world.
They are a very good pet in some, in lots of ways. Out of all the kind of pet reptiles, I think they're probably the most interactive and have the most personality, which is one of the reasons why they're very, very popular as pets. But obviously with popularity does, come a price, and, certainly in the last kind of 10 years or so, we've seen a lot of overbreeding of bearded dragons and some welfare problems as a result of that as well.
And actually some emerging diseases in bearded dragons, which are getting more common as a result of kind of overpopulation and, and poor breeding practises. So I've just, put up obviously two kind of very different pictures of bearded dragons on the 1st, 1st slide. One being a bearded dragon showing, you know, what he's named for, is this, is this beard that he can make very dark and and blow up as a kind of aggressive threat display or territorial display.
You know, in a natural environment. And then what we kind of, some people do to them or with them as pets and really, anthropomorphize them and, and really they do become members of, of a person's family, and you can have, clients that are very, very attached emotionally, to these animals, which is quite unusual for a lot of reptiles. A lot of reptile hobbyists kind of have an interest in the biology of the species they keep.
And find them unusual, but with bearded dragons, you definitely get a subset of clientele that are really, really as emotionally attached as they would be to their dog or their cat. Oh, I've done several webinars on reptiles before for the webinar and one of the kind of, good ones to look at if you want to, to have a look is top 10 reptile. And I've gone through that in great detail.
We're obviously not going to have time to run through it and if you bearded dragon specific on every single one, but all of the common reptile clinical conditions that present to the to the veterinary clinic do occur in bearded dragons. And we're focusing on that one species, but we do need to say that any of the other reptile webinars I've done. Available on recording are well worth a look if if you are interested in treating in particular.
So really, what I want to cover tonight is how and why do these kind of conditions present bearded dragons specifically. And I've broken it down really into kind of 5 broad categories. I think the first two are very definitely the most common and the the main reasons that we see problems in bearded dragons, and that would be husbandry and nutrition.
And that's nothing new. That, that applies to all reptiles, indeed, all exotic pets. I think there's a huge amount of, of what I would do as an exotic vet, in terms of giving advice, which is based around, how they're kept and what they're fed.
And it can get quite complex in reptiles, and it's quite hard to sometimes to, give the same advice over and over again. But I think we need to recognise that, with exotic pets, there's such an abundance of information out there. It can be hard sometimes for the clients to access good information and to, really learn what is the best way to keep my animal or how best should I feed it, because there's so much conflicting information.
The other issues I think, or, or kind of categories that contribute to the disease and poor welfare in, in Beardies specifically, would be genetics. You know, they, they are bred for colour morphs and things like that, and they're overbred and, and there is a degree of inbreeding going on. So we're seeing some, genetic disease.
Or kind of issues with kind of thriving, that could be linked to genetic problems in the species in captive populations. We're also seeing issues with, you know, the pet trade in general. I mean, almost every bearded dragon that you can find in the UK now has been captive bred for generations, which is a good thing.
They're not coming from the wild generally. There's a few, kind of, less common species that sometimes come from the wild. But generally, all of the bearded dragons you see will be captive bred for generations.
But because of their popularity, you know, in the last kind of 1015 years, there has been, some issues with how they're bred and when they're bred en masse, what kind of problems that causes, and I'll get into that as well. And then sometimes it's just bad luck, or indeed bad management on the part of, of the pet owner that just results in, in something happening that that leads to them needing veterinary care. So I think I always start when I talk about reptiles saying if you want to succeed in keeping reptiles in captivity, the first thing you need to realise is that they're not a domesticated species even though they've been, you know, bred in captivity for many generations, it doesn't mean they're domesticated truly.
So I would always say that if you want to succeed, keeping them in captivity, you need to look to their natural environment and what they do and how they act and how they behave in the wild. And what their climate and and environment is like in the wild. So by recreating that, you know, you need, you need to do a bit of research, but by recreating what's happening in the wild, you can't go far wrong if you try and replicate that in captivity.
So they're, they're an Australian species. There's several species in the genus, and the one that we see most often is the inland bearded dragon, the gona vitis. And that's the, the most common one.
There's a couple of other, less common, species, Rankins, dragons that you'll occasionally see, but the same principles apply in all of these species. And they come from very dry, arid, kind of habitats in Australia. Scrubland, woodland, grassland, and indeed, you know, what we'd class as desert.
There can be seasonal, rains and things like that, but generally most of the year they're coming from a quite a dry and hot climate, and that is, you know, just really, really important, when we're trying to design the best habitat for them in captivity. I've talked about seasonality a little bit, but the seasonality really does go through some extremes in that kind of climate from really, really high temperatures and no rainfall for long periods of time. And indeed food availability is, is sparse in some of those very hot and dry periods, right through to kind of the cooler times where, they will actually go underground and become a little bit dormant, it's what's called bruation.
So it's not hibernation, they're not going dormant in cold weather. They're, they're broom mating, they're going in very hot weather and in cooler kind of times in in a hot climate as well. Because of that, we do need very high temperatures and a very high UV index in the lighting that we provide for them in captivity.
So reptiles are very dependent diurnal reptiles and nocturnal to some extent with a different different process going on. Diurnal reptiles, especially from desert kind of, environments, really need a lot of, UV exposure from the sun. And we replicate that in captivity with, UVB bulbs.
There's lots of different lighting systems. Again, it's a big cause of confusion for clients, and it's something that as, you know, kind of Trusted vets and nurses who are interested in reptiles, we should be able to give the advice on what to buy. And I'll get into lighting a little bit later.
But safe to say, if we don't give them the right temperatures and we don't give them the right lighting in captivity, that's a really, really, a recipe for failure, in how, in how they're going to fare, basically in our in our care. Their feeding habits are very varied in the wild, and it depends on the time of year. It depends on kind of, different seasons, producing different plants and and animals.
And also, fasting periods, you know, they do go through phases where there's not a lot of food. Around and reptiles are very well able to cope with very prolonged fasting. So you may have lizards presenting with anorexia, which could be normal, and I'll I'll get into how we distinguish that, but anorexia and reptiles can be normal and nothing to worry about in some cases, and recognising that that is very important.
A lot of owners think, I've got a pet, it's a reptile I must eat every day. That's not necessarily true. It's not the same as a warm-blooded, animal like a dog or a cat.
Sociality is an interesting one. These are not, a sociable species. They do tend to just hang out on their own in the in the wild.
The only times really they come together or are seen together in the wild is for, competition for resources. So if they're accessing a very good food supply, if they're accessing. You know, a nest site, to lay their eggs, or, particularly good basking areas along a, a kind of linear habitat or something, you'll often see several lizards competing for that.
But they try and do it without too much aggression. So the beard is very important for visual display, where they'll puff up that beard and and make it go very dark, and they'll head Bob, and they'll. Wave their their their legs at each other.
And that comes into being territorial, but also kind of mate choice and and courtship. And they are a, a, a species that displays kind of a hierarchy when they do come together. And that can have implications if we try and put them together, or put incompatible individuals together in a captive environment where they can't escape.
So going on to kind of captive husbandry, I always compare the wild state first to what we can provide in in. There's several different systems of how reptiles in general are kept and, and they do apply to bearded dragons as well. And I would sort of break it down really into three main systems of, of care or husbandry, that most people, prescribe to.
Obviously they can, you know, take elements of, of two or even 3 of them and combine them together. But the three that I would say are broad categories would be naturalistic, clinical, and anthropomorphized kind of pet, systems, which is a little less defined. It depends on the owner, what way they keep them.
But, all of them. Really have the same housing, lighting and heating requirements. That doesn't change, you know, whether they're just because they're in captivity or they're a pet.
It doesn't change their ultimate biology and their, their, physiological needs, and their physiological needs in reptiles are intimately linked with, the external environment because they are ectotherms. They rely on external temperature for all the bodily functions and metabolic processes to work. Seasonal rhythms is a controversial one.
It's like, should we, are they required in captivity? Well, maybe they're not required because you can get away with, or you can have an animal that survives perfectly well without replicating the seasonality of their wild environment. But the question remains, are they surviving or are they thriving?
And should we be replicating it to the extent of, seasonal variation? Many keepers do, especially keepers that are trying to breed their reptiles, will replicate the seasons because that's a very strong stimulus for the hormonal reproductive cycle. But it, you know, there's not enough research done on the ill effects of, you know, maintaining a constant climate throughout the entire year and having a 12 hours on, 12 hours off photo period for the entire year as well.
So, my tendency is always to start with the principle of try and replicate the, the wild environment, and you can't go far wrong. And then there may be a little bit of tweaking that is, is OK based on a case by case basis. A lot of people, as you can see in this picture, this is a group of, juvenile or hatchling bearded dragons, probably from a commercial premises, .
That are co-housed because, you know, to house them individually with individual heating, individual UV lamps and things like that would be cost prohibitive for a wholesaler or even a retailer. And we're not going to get into the ethics and the legislation and the Animal Welfare Act and what that means. In this session, I would like to, but, the, the reality is that a lot of these will be co-housed.
Where the public are seeing them and maybe getting the idea of, oh, I would really like to have one of these as it as a pet. So, there, there's a big risk with cohabitation because as I said, they're not particularly social species. There is a hierarchy, you know, that that emerges when they're group housed, and some of them can, end up getting injured, especially by, larger tank.
So there is a risk there. I would say based on that, in case I forget later, you will often have clients come in and they have a pair of bearded dragons that have lived together for a long time. And if you talk to them about, oh, you really should keep them alone, you often will get a lot of reluctance or, you know, a bad reaction saying, no, they're best friends, or they're they do fine together, I've never had a problem.
And it goes back to the, well, just because you've never had a problem yet doesn't mean a problem isn't going to arise later on. So if you read any bearded dragon forums, you do get people fighting quite, you know. Passionately about the fact that bearded dragons should be always kept singly.
It's not without risk, I think is the thing to say. And, I guess our job is to inform our clients of, those risks and, and let them decide for themselves if they want to take them. There's also cost and value impacts, I guess, on kind of welfare and captivity at the moment with any reptile, but what's happened with birdies is, they've undergone a craze that a lot of popular reptile species have in that selective breeding has, allowed a lot of different colour mutations and scale mutations to arise.
And, although those rare forms become very, very valuable and desirable. By virtue of the fact that they are rare, and, you know, people want them and want to breed them. The humble, normal bearded dragon morph, just the wild type, has really suffered as a result.
And one of the reasons is they have large clutch sizes of eggs that produced a large volume of offspring, and their cost, because they, everyone started breeding them at the same time, the cost of the lizard really came down. The cost of a setup to do it properly. Is very high, many times the amount of lizard, and therefore welfare impact is quite high because the value of the animal, is sort of reduced and the market is saturated.
So you do have people unfortunately, that will skimp on what they provide for their lizard because the lizard cost them £20 on Gumtree, and they're not going to spend 2 or 300 pounds on a proper setup for it. So moving on to the types of husbandry systems, I said that my preference if, you know, people are keeping reptiles in captivity is to go with a naturalistic husbandry style. I think it's more, visually appealing, but, you know, it's arguably better for the animal.
Recreate their wild state as best you can, but you know there are pros and cons of each. Wild recreation and the bioactive movement is something that's really emerging again, recent in recent years and . It's, it's shown, you know, to, to really have big benefits in, in kind of rare species if we keep them in kind of wild recreation systems that they will breed and procreate.
And, you know, the zoos are doing this all the time for endangered species and things. But there's been a sort of movement within the hobby to go back to nature and go back to getting away from these clinical systems of having, you know, tubs of reptiles and, and having 30 reptiles in your collection. Hopefully back towards having 3 reptiles in your collection that are kept extremely well and very enriched, large, and, and, wild like enclosures and things.
So there's pros and cons of that. The, the big thing I think in any of these systems is that you need to give the animal enough space and the background image in this slide has plenty of space, but you will notice, I think there's at least 5 or 6, bearded dragons in that one enclosure. So again, there's some of the cons that you could criticise it for.
But it does have several areas for basking. It's got, you know, different ledges and, and things like that. So there's, shared resources at least they're not all looking for the same resource.
And it's allowing them to do two things. It's allowing them to thermoregulate, so regulating their temperature by their behaviour. They can move away to cooler areas and warmer areas as the day goes by and depending on their body temperature.
But they can also get away from the light and they can go in. Little caves and nooks and crannies and things. And those two things are very, very important for avoiding stress.
If an animal doesn't, if a reptile doesn't have the ability to thermo and to regulate, and they can get very stressed. And beardies are pretty hardy by comparison to some of the other, reptile diurnal lizards like chameleons and things, but it's still important for them to be able to do that. Climate and seasonal variation can often be, you know, controlled very well, and most of the kind of naturalistic style keepers would do that very well.
Clinical husbandry, by contrast, is, you know, a very stark, kind of, un-enriched, barren, cages or enclosures to varying degrees, and you can have cage furniture and things in these systems, but This is a picture of, you know, a breeding facility that's producing different colour morphs of breedies and might have, you know, single adult, breeders in, in individual cages and then groups of, of young cohounds. But it's basically, you know, paper on the floor, a UV light, a basking lamp, and they're fed, you know, and that's basically all they have for enrichment. So the big breeders are doing this, and the thing that's happened recently, you know, is that, YouTube breeders have become a, a pretty Big sensation, especially for young people coming into the hobby and and deciding they're interested in reptiles.
And there is sort of an aspirational element to that, that they see these, social media reptile experts or big breeders, often in the states, I might add, doing things on a factory level, you know, industrial scale reptile breeding. And that's what they think is the pinnacle of, of reptile keeping and, and, they're not learning at all about the naturalistic style where kind of the herb. Hobby started, with, you know, recreating a slice of nature and observing the animal's habits and things.
It has become about, money in a certain sense sense, but it's also become about genetics and breeding and, what, what kind of stamp collection morphs do you have in your in your collection. So you do have a subset of people who are Very large collections of animals. Obviously, there's a, a biosecurity element there, and, and we need to, to be wary of infectious disease and those kind of large collections and advise on those.
And then there's this another faction of people who keep birdies, and I use the phrase keeping dragons safe, because it's an interesting Facebook forum. Bearded dragon Forum, which gets a lot of stick from the other kind types of keepers, and keeping dragon safe philosophy is often, people who say the naturalistic style is risky because it uses loose substrate and loose substrate can cause. Actions and, you know, we want to keep our, our be on paper or on astroturf because we couldn't risk an impaction.
And I'll come on to impactions and and why that happens in the nutrition, section. But, really there's a, there's a little bit of There's something to learn there about why the naturalistic style can benefit the animal and why impactions happen is often due to inappropriate husbandry. So yeah, it's there's a bit of education to be done, I think, on, on, a lot of people who are getting mixed messages when they're reading stuff.
The third category is a bit of a made up one, but it's where people are keeping beardies really, really, in a very anthropomorphic kind of way, and they're ascribing real human personality to some of their behaviours. Very much family members and they're treated like royalty, but the, the, the cages and the setups and things that they, they have are often so far removed really from their wild. In this one, I'm sure that the lizard is kept very well and loved very well, but, you know, it's got a furry hammock and a blanky at night, and it's even got some healing crystals and a lava lamp and Christmas decorations on there.
Now, I don't know if that bearded dragon is, is happy, and, meeting, you know, all its welfare needs are being met. It certainly looks very well fed, . But that's a really, really careful and dedicated owner, who can be, you know, very, very good owner, but also it, I think you need to recognise with this type of owner that sometimes their knowledge on reptile biology and what a reptile needs is, is sometimes lacking.
And the reason I say that is often what goes hand in hand with this style of ownership is that the animal is out, you know, on their lap, on their shoulder, watching television with them in the evening, or even free roaming around the house. And what that's what's happening there is that the animal is not getting, meeting their ectotherm. Needs of being able to regulate properly.
They're not in a controlled climatic environment which has the high temperatures and high UVB exposure over a 24 hour period that they need. So you can get subclinical disease if they're not getting that, and they're being humanised too much and taken out of that controlled environment. So yeah, just recognising different styles of owners and, and, educating them, I guess in a different way, it is quite subtle and something that kind of comes to experience and comes with.
So what do they need? This is a really difficult thing to say, do you know what, the one source you need for all your bearded dragon info is this, because there's very, there's too many, there's lots of variables. You can't really give the perfect care sheet that will apply to everybody that buys a bearded dragon.
Of every age, you know, every circumstance. There's lots of different housing types. I would always say, you know, people argue about, you know, they shouldn't be kept in an aquarium, they shouldn't be kept in a plastic tub.
A wooden vivarium is best. I would say a box is a box. You can make a glass box, a plastic box, or a wooden box, equally good or equally bad for a bearded dragon, and this example is a pretty poor example.
I just an image I found online on a . On website online, where, you know, it's been kept in a very poorly insulated glass aquarium with a single heat source, no UVB light. The substrate is loose sand and it looks pretty dirty and hasn't been cleaned out in quite a while, and very little room for that animal to thermoregulate properly.
But even saying to someone, you need a 60 watt bulb and a 12% UVB light and a wooden vivarium is often not enough advice because the variables in their home might mean that that one vivarium is sitting next to a radiator or indirect sunlight of a window or exposed to lots of draughts. So in one home that might provide exactly the right conditions. In another home, the same care sheet might be totally inappropriate for the animal.
So I think instead of us describing to a client, here's my perfect care sheet for a bearded dragon, that's only part of the conversation, but trying to educate them or get them to research themselves, obviously, that's the, the the common sense approach, but unfortunately people don't do it. . Research for themselves or educate them about why temperature is important, why lighting is important, and what are the principles they need to know about reptiles and about what their bearded dragon is going to do to allow them to set up the the perfect environment themselves.
And monitoring that environment, you know, so many people, so many clients come in and I ask, you know, what, what time. Sure you're keeping your dragon at cool and and warm end. He's got a 60 watt bow, but that's not the the answer to the question.
The answer to the question is, it's 34 degrees at the warm end and it's about 26 at the cool end, and I know that because I've got a digital thermometer in there and I monitor it. That's the thing we need to be encouraging, is people to take an interest in the environment as well as the lizard. They need space and security as well, you know, if you're, if you're cramming them into a small tank like this that is exposed on all sides, then that is ultimately a prey species in the wild.
So it's going to feel pretty, out in the open and exposed by that. Social contact, I think I've talked enough about. It's, my advice would be to house singly, and to tell people there are risks involved of aggression and dominance and and hierarchy and even, you know, pretty serious injuries sometimes where you're co-housing them.
Heating and lighting, really is vital and educating them about that, we'll come on to that in a second, is really vital. Nutrition equally important as well. So there's a lot of places where people can, you know, fall down in their knowledge or their experience or what they're doing.
So taking a detailed history and preferably asking any clients that come in before their appointment, asking them for a picture of the, the housing setup, is really, really useful for you to be able to pull out. Actually, this might be the cause of the problem. So I don't want to get into too much like technical detail, but I know it's really important to try and have some figures and some important principles.
So I just want to spend one slide talking about the specifics of what, what they, what bearded dragons need in their environment. And no doubt some people, if I put this up on 12 reptile forums, I would have 12. Few points.
Well, actually, no, it should be this, it should be that. These are broad guidelines and and broad figures, but they give you a good idea of the kind of environmental parameters that we want to provide. So the first thing first is that they need a gradient, a cool end of the enclosure, and a warm end of the enclosure.
And the way you can get that is by making the enclosure big enough. Because if you have a powerful heat source over a small enclosure, then the whole enclosure is going to heat up. It's just common sense.
The next thing is that we want higher temperatures in the daytime than the nighttime, so we do have a natural kind of temperature, fluctuation, which would happen in the desert. So in the daytime, the ambient temperature, the air temperature within the vivarium should range from somewhere around 24 °C to 32 °C from the cool end to the warm end. Going up or down 1 or 2 °C on that range is fine as long as the animal has space to thermoregulate.
The basking spot is really important. These are sun worshipping animals. They will come out in the morning when they're cooler, and they will find a warm place to lie, and they'll get their, their, they'll raise their body temperature by conduction and convection.
So conduction from the substrate or a rock or surface they're lying on, and convection from the sun's rays. So they, they're visual, they need a visually, light emitting basking lamp to go under and warm themselves up. And the, the basking spots where they're lying underneath that basking lamp should be much higher than the ambient temperature, and it can even go up to 35 to 40 °C, without any harm.
The warning there is that we need to eliminate any burn risks. So reptiles have different thermal receptors in their skin, and they can get into a situation where they get burnt if they stay too close to a heat source for too long without recognising that they are getting burnt. So what we want to do is we want to have the heat source at a high enough height away from the animal that they're not too close, can't get too close to it, and potentially have a guard around it as well so they can't.
Climb on it or jump onto it from, from cage furniture. And that's an issue with some of the low, kind of, wooden long vivarians. Well, once you put a bulb in the lid of in the roof of that vivarian, the bulb is very close to the animal, so, it can be inappropriately hot.
So distance is, is important, but you want to measure the temperature where the animal is going to be in that basking spot, and it should be a very narrow beam of, of heat, up to kind of 35 to 40 degrees. The next thing is at nighttime it should cool down to about 18 to 20 degrees in the cool end. And even lower at certain times of the year, you know, in the cool season, you can bring that lower, again, without much harm.
But you need to be careful that it's not dropping consistently below 18 all year round, and they are prone to kind of respiratory infections and things like that if they're on the cold side for too long. The photo period, so the length of daytime, normally for most of the year can be 12 hours on, 12 hours off, and you can use a very cheap timer for that. But if you want to follow the seasons, you can look up the kind of, seasonal variation in their natural habitat and mimic that, you know, go down to kind of 8 or 10 hours, and sometimes in the, in the kind of winter season.
Then we move on to lighting. Lighting is really, really important. I said they're sun worshipers and they recognise visual, light spectrum in a different way than we do, and they need full spectrum lighting, but the most important spectrum of lighting they need is UVB lighting.
And that mimics the sunshine, and the sunshine in action on the skin allows them to make vitamin D, which is totally vital in, in calcium metabolism and absorption from the diet. And we get big problems if we're not providing calcium in the diet, the correct temperatures to digest the diet, or indeed, UVB. That's the triangle that they need, lighting, heating, and, the correct diet in order to remain healthy.
And specifically, For, bearded dragons, we want to go with a UVB spectrum which mimics a desert environment. So at least 10, but preferably 12% UVB. Direct exposure over the whole tank, that's important.
Some people will use a combination bulb, which sits back up in the basking bulb. It's a combined heat and UVB source. But the problem with that is they're only going into that 35 to 40 degrees basking spot to warm their body up, and then they're moving around the rest of the tank.
And if that's the only source of UVB light that they're getting, then there's a much of the day where they're not getting UVB at all because as they move away from the light source, the the UVB index diminishes. So the UVB light, the best thing to do is have a separate strip light or fluorescent tube light. Across almost the entire tank within, you know, a good distance, a safe distance, of the animal itself, I would say, you know, if you're going kind of 10 to 12 inches away from the animal, you're losing a lot of that exposure.
So normally between kind of 8 and 10 inches of the animal is good. Humidity should be low and again, just like they should be using a thermometer, they should also think about using a high grometer and making sure the humidity isn't too high. And low generally for arid conditions means kind of 30 to 40% maximum.
Equipment, there's lots of different ways of doing things, but, my kind of ideal setup would have a light emitting basking lamp, and it would have the fluorescent tube that I talked about giving the UV light across the whole whole enclosure. And if you're not getting nighttime ambient temperatures of 18 to 20 degrees, then possibly a heat mat at nighttime on the bottom of the tank or the side of the tank might be useful as well. But as with any heating equipment, A thermostat is really, really important for controlling the temperature, overheating them is as dangerous as underheating them in the long term.
So, just moving on then to nutrition. This is a topic that is absolutely huge and I could spend a whole, lecture basically and our whole hour talking about nutrition. You don't have time to go into that, but I just want to give some principles that that apply, and where kind of people fall down in terms of their.
The, the first thing to say is that bearded dragons are true omnivores. We talked about the seasonality of food availability in the wild, and that really affects what they're eating kind of, week to week, month to month, and throughout the the seasons. So the, the diet includes animal protein and plant material as well.
And at certain times of year, you know, one will replace the other to a great extent. But the tendency in captivity is, unfortunately, and the advice that a lot of pet shops give is that they're primarily fed on crickets or mealworms and occasional salad. I think we need to get past that way of thinking and realise that, veggies are things.
Are far healthier and a better way of feeding them with insects as a portion of the diet. Because the problem in captivity, of course, is that they're not moving around as much as they would in the wild, and there's a tendency for owners to feed them on a daily basis, a very good hearty meal, and an excess of calories, which does lead to obesity. Obesity is a big problem in these guys, and it can lead to all the issues that obesity leads to in other species as well.
But, kind of we can have big reproductive problems and things like that where animals are in a very kind of positive energy balance and have a lot of abdominal fat and so on. So insects, it's important when we're feeding insectivorous lizards that we treat the insects and and take care of the insects just as well as we, we do, the, the animal that's going to eat them. So what I mean by that is, we need to be giving a variety of insects.
There's no point. Getting your dragon hooked on one specific species of insect and not eating anything else, that can happen, they can be very selective feeders if they get into bad habits or are only fed a small variety of foods. So we want to feed a variety and the commercially available ones would be, crickets, mealworms, locusts.
Mealworms is not great. I think in order of preference, I would be going with locusts crickets, cockroaches is several species that you can get commercially. Mealworms should be a small part, and they're not really very nutritious.
The top picture on the right hand side is, an American picture which I disagree with in quite a few ways because it relies on a lot of, these brand name commercial diets, so canned, insects, which I think are not. Necessary. We should be feeding live fresh insects.
And it also says 25% of the diet should be this prepared pelleted, bearded dragon food. I would steer clear of that with, with these species. I think it's much better to feed them a natural, wholesome, healthy diet, if possible.
So what we also want to do with insects is gut load them, and that means feeding the insects a nutritious diet. So part of the veggies and leafy greens and fruits and things that we want to get into our beardies diet can go in the in the diet through the insect. So feeding the insects hydrates them after being in storage and and transit, and it also makes them more nutritious because it puts a nutritious meal into the insect's gut.
And then supplementing them is just as important. So with, with insects, we want to, address, they have a calcium phosphorus imbalance. So we do want to dust them almost every feed, with a, a calcium only powdered supplement.
Just a very light dusting, just before we feed them to the animal, and that will address the calcium phosphorus imbalance that most of them have. With plants, we want to go with dark leafy greens, salads, veg. Fruit is really in moderation, if at all.
So I would agree with the 5% fruits is probably a good, thing, but they don't really need it. They're not going to be getting a lot of sugary fruits, in the Australian outback. So, again, mimic the natural state.
I don't think fruit is a huge portion of the diet. With supplements, there's, there's various ones, and again, it's a bit of a minefield, . But the, the principles I would use is most feeds should have a calcium supplement.
Their calcium demands are quite high, especially in young growing animals. So you should have at least two supplements, one being calcium only, and the second one used a little more sparingly, maybe twice a week in juveniles, once a week in adults, is a combined multivitamin and mineral supplement, which includes calcium and vitamin D3. And that just means that if your UVB light is, is not giving out much output it coming towards the end of its lifespan, or, your temperature's quite off, it's just a sort of insurance policy that they're getting what they need from the diet as well.
And it's addressing any imbalances there. So, UVB light and temperature, as I said, really intimately linked to its diet. And, we need to kind of teach about how, how that's important.
One thing I forgot to say when I talked about UVB light is that the bulbs, the fluorescent tubes that we buy will give out light for a very, very long time, but they don't continue to emit, . Emit UVB light for that entire time. So generally, most of them on the market tend to need to be replaced every 12 months, but you need to check and make a note of when your bulb, your specific bulb needs to be replaced.
And the brand that I would recognise, not getting paid by them, but they They are brilliant, and they've published a lot of data, and I've, friends and colleagues who've tested it independently. Arcadia. Arcadia produced a range of balls that are just getting better and better year on year, and have a very long lifespan.
So they're, they're good value, for money, and they're, you know, guaranteed to last the the stated time. Feeding, I talked about obesity, it needs to be done sparingly. There's no harm in, you know, a few off days.
You don't need to feed these animals every day, but if you are feeding them every day, feed sparingly. Recognise that at certain times of the year, if it does cool down or they're taking external cues from the environment, they will, go off their food and roommate, so they become quite quiet and lethargic and go off their food for a period of time. That can be manipulated back into feeding, artificially by controlling photo period and and temperatures.
But recognise again that anorexia is a clinical sign for all diseases in reptiles and you need to rule out anything more serious and make sure you're certain explanation. Digestion and gut transit time is temperature dependent, so that has an impact obviously if there's, if they're eating a a, you know, poor quality diet and the temperature is, is too low, then they're not gonna be getting the most from their food and they, they can't come to nutritional diseases as well. And then just a word on, sand impaction.
So sand is sort of a bad word and some bearded dragon circles and, other people, you know, contest the fact they're on sand in the wild, it's fine. One of the main reasons for, sand ingestion and impactions to occur is, either a deficiency in their diet where they're deliberately eating the sand, and that's probably less common, but sometimes they're accidentally. Eating sand with the food or on the food, and it gradually can build up.
The main reason that an impaction will occur is, a low temperature or incorrect husbandry. So if the gut transit is very sluggish and sand is building over building up over time, that can lead to an impaction. So it's a bit of a myth that putting a bearded dragon on sand is going to lead to an impaction.
In fact, it's normally a nutrition. I'll move on because I know we're we're, we've a lot to cover. So genetics has an impact.
I've talked already a little bit about, I'm not going to get into detail, but just recognise that there is a degree of inbreeding and selective breed line breeding here for genetic colour morphs. There's even, you know, scaleless varieties of bearded dragons now. I'm not going to say what look like, but.
People do see the appeal of them. But we are seeing things like tumours. We're definitely seeing lines that have really ill thrift and succumbed to other diseases or secondary problems.
We're seeing deformities in hatchlings, which are often blamed on the temperature and incubation. That's a convenient excuse, I think, for a lot of genetic deformities, which, which may be, the, the real cause. And I think we're definitely seeing some issues with disease resistance due to, breeding.
Trade has a lot to answer for in terms of welfare problems. I talked about at the start their popularity declining and big breeders and wholesalers selling this aspirational kind of reptile collection mentality. But for, you know, if you do have some people like that on your, on your client list, I think, you know, talking to them about biosecurity and disease transmission is really prudent because there's two, infectious diseases which are, Gaining in in incidents in a lot of cases in the last few years, one being adenovirus or atidenovirus, and the other one being something called CAV or a yellow skin disease, which I'll come to later on.
But the thing with the trade is often these animals in in retail are not set up for success because they've come through kind of very overcrowded conditions, sometimes unsanitary conditions, and how they're housed as, in pet shops is often kind of a role model or, or, education to their new potential owners. So, pet shops can get it wrong and, new customers and ultimately owners can get it wrong too. The last category I call bad luck, but it actually can be bad management as well.
You can have very well meaning and very knowledgeable owners that unfortunately acquire an animal that's not well and doesn't show illness for. Those two infectious diseases we'll talk about that you know the clinical signs don't. Oh, hi Sean, sorry to interrupt.
We appear to have lost you. Oh, you're back. And the microphone was just cutting out then as you moved on to the slide.
OK, yeah, I'll start again, no worries. Thanks. So I talked about it being sort of bad luck on some problems, but sometimes it's bad management as well, either before the client has had the animal or indeed after.
So that the infectious diseases we're seeing are often a case of bad luck because the clinical signs don't appear for long after purchase. So that's a problem for, you know, very well-meaning and knowledgeable owners, that, that happen to pick up an animal with subclinical disease. The other thing can be, parasite infections, you know, often they will come in with parasite infections, and some have direct life cycles, and that becomes a problem over time even with sort of commensal or non-pathogenic, parasites.
But you can get some pathogenic parasites as well. And with adenovirus in particular, you do see, susceptibility to parasitic and secondary infections. So that's often one of the first warning signs of adenoviruss and beardies.
You can get trauma from free ranging, but you can also get trauma from cohabitation, and the X-ray there, which didn't come out very well, is a macerated forelimb from a cage mate biting or attacking that little bearded dragon juvenile. But the good news is they do very well with amputation. And you can sometimes have issues with other pets, you know, harming them and so on.
So I'm gonna move on to a couple of conditions. We're gonna fly through them really, really quickly. I said in more detail if you want to get into kind of clinical conditions, there's some other recordings.
Look at, but metabolic bone disease unfortunately is still a problem in pet reptiles, and it's see now, considering the equipment and the education, and the, the amount of resource out there that that is available for people to, to, to do their homework on. But metabolic bone disease basically poor bone calcification due to either a vitamin D3 deficiency, which can be caused by inadequate UVB. It can also be caused by a dietary deficiency in calcium.
And vitamin A and D have a role to play as well. And generally it results in, you know, softening of the bones, osteomalacia because the bones are used as a calcium sump and the body starts to absorb them to maintain kind of calcium homeostasis and calcium levels in the blood. So, the, as I said, vitamin D is produced by ultraviolet light on the skin.
In the wild, they get very high exposure and if we don't reproduce that in captivity with the right lighting and changing those bulbs on a regular basis, as well as providing the right diet, then we run into. Clinical signs you'll often see, range from very vague, just anorexia and weight loss and lethargy, right through to kind of acute hypocalcemic episodes of trembling and weakness, . Lameness as well, sometimes due to fractures, you know, secondary fractures, due to softening of the bones.
Reproductive problems are often go hand in hand with subclinical metabolic bone disease, because when female animals, in particular, goes to lay eggs, there's a huge calcium demand there, and it can lead to metabolic bone disease. Fractures, scoliosis, as you can see in the bottom picture, a soft shell and loans is. Is one of the signs.
And the rubber jaw, so you get softening of the the lower mandible is a typical sign. You might get a bit of dragon holding its mouth open and its tongue slightly protruding. That can be a sign that the jaw is softening as well.
Often the extremities are the first to, lose bone density. So on an X-ray, you might lose the transverse processes of the tail, you might lose the definition of the digits, and the bones there, and the lower mandible as well. Treatment depends on how far gone it is.
Aggressive kind of, calcium supplementation and UVB provision will start to reverse the process, but if there's permanent, disfigurement and and damage done, it's not going to, resolve those. Those issues. And you also need to bear in mind that they need supportive renal care, fluid therapy, and feeding, you know, high calcium diet and possibly oral vitamin D supplements as well in the short term.
It's a very long recovery, and as I said, permanent problems can result. So moving on from kind of calcium disorders, what is very linked to, as I said, is really productive. Two most common ones that you'll see in bearded dragons, are female, egg binding problems.
There's two types of what we refer to as egg binding and clients, often would use, . So using sometimes clinically to rule them out from just the history. But the first is pre-ovulatory or follicular stasis.
So pre-ovulatory egg binding means they haven't formed eggs. It's all at the level of the ovary and the follicles. Post-ovulatory is true egg binding or dystopia.
So we'll run through those. So pre-ovulatory egg binding, it's called follicular stasis because follicles start to form and then they don't go any further. Don't ovulate, they never come down into the oviduct.
If it's early stages and that happens and something changes and the reproductive cycle is halted, then sometimes the female will resorb those follicles back into her body, but oftentimes it reaches a late stage, especially in in captivity when times are good. This is . One of the few reptile diseases that I describe as a disease of good husbandry, because very often we're feeding these animals at their absolute maximum growth rate, and they're growing up and maturing and becoming sexually mature at totally unnatural rates than they would in the wild.
And they're not maintaining a lean body condition. They're in a small environment, they're becoming obese, and the female at reproductive age is turning that into, I'm going to produce the largest clutch of eggs I can. So she starts to kind of hyper ovulate and produce all these massive follicles.
If those Follicles don't resorb, and if that animal isn't stimulated to ovulate and breed in the presence of a male or, you know, other environmental cues, then those follicles will become inflamed. They can lead to infection. Sellaite is and ultimately death.
So it is a fatal condition left untreated. The factors that feed into it would be, are are complex and often multifactorial, so diet, husbandry, lack of hibernation sometimes or ruination in this case, stress, underlying disease, and ultimately a hormonal imbalance that kind of stops at that level of the cycle. The diagnosis, often comes from history, and even just looking at the animals, sometimes you can see the distended abdomen and the shape of the follicles.
But before that, the animal becomes anorexic, lethargic, and it will have a distended abdomen often because they literally fill up with these follicles, and ultrasound or X-ray will often show you them. So on this x-ray you can see. The classic sign is a kind of bunch of grapes appearance.
They're, they're round and spherical and soft tissue opacity masses all throughout the lower kind of sloic cavity. You can see that there. If they're not very ill, the treatment can be alter diet, and it's an early stage, altered diet, and correct the husbandry issues, gives them a sight or an access to male, and sometimes it will resolve.
But most of the time when these present, like many reptile diseases, they present when it's a chronic problem and they're, they're really ill. And, most of the time at that stage, the only treatment that's going to be successful is surgical correction. And supportive care.
The prognosis is very poor without. So for a surgical correction, this is the, the one of my listed patients in dorsal recumbency. Look carefully and maybe tilt your screen.
You can actually see the shape of the follicles on her ventral abdomen, you know, and when you open, you use a paraedian. Hi Sean, sorry to interrupt again. I just lost you a bit.
You're saying about that you can see the shape on the ventral abdomen and then you disappeared. OK, sorry about that. I don't know what's wrong with my microphone.
Can you hear me now? Yes, I can hear you perfectly now. I need to apologise as well.
I've got a cold, so I do, I'm I'm not normally this bunged up. So yeah, I was just saying you can see on the pressing against kind of the ventral abdomen, the shape of the follicles there. This, this animal was so distended.
I make a paramian incision because you can see the blood vessel medial on the ventral abdomen of lizards, a good site for blood collection, but you don't want to go through that in your incision. So paramedeian incision reveals the follicles, and they look like egg yolks, on either side on each ovary. The difficulty with doing this, ovarectomy is that, you, or ovaria self-pingectomy, you take out some of the oviduct as well, is, that on one side, the, the ovary lies very close to the vena cava and on the other side to the adrenal gland.
So when you're placing your ligatures, it's, it's very important that you get it in the right. That brings about an issue that you need to talk to the owner about that in a small proportion of these lizards, they can actually regenerate some ovarian tissue. So if you leave even a few ovarian cells within your ligature or in that in that region, they can regenerate in the problem.
It can happen again. So I would always preempt this operation with saying, there is unfortunately not a 100% success rate or cure rate. There's a, there's a 5 or 10% chance, depending on your surgical skill, that the, the problem could happen.
Moving on quickly to true dystopia egg binding eggs and this is a post ovulatory conditions. So Hi Sean, I'm really sorry because I know we haven't got long left, but would you mind dialling the webinar please? Yeah, no problem.
Sorry about that. That's OK. No, we want to, there's no point in not hearing it.
OK, can you hear me now? Perfect. Thank you, Sean, sorry for the delay, everyone.
No, it's OK. Sorry about that. I don't know what's wrong with my microphone.
It's never happened before. But yeah, just, I'll start again with dystopia. Dystopia is difficulty giving birth or laying eggs, as we know, and this is always post obligatory, so the eggs have formed, and we have two types of, of, dystopia, obstructive and non-obstructive.
The X-ray I'm showing now is, a water dragon, not a bearded dragon. I've never had an obstructive dystopia in a in a beardy. But, the, the eggs are too large to pass through her pelvic cavity, so oversized eggs is the most common, reason for that in in reptiles, .
The other reason for. Tumours and bladder stones and the treatment in, in, bearded dragons is generally going to be surgery. In some other species that have a low number of eggs, snakes in particular, where they're more accessible, you can do obcentesis, but bearded dragons can lay, you know, over 50 eggs at a time, so that's not really an option.
In non-obstructive disease, normally the issue is husbandry. So it's either you haven't had the environmental parameters right, for the animal in the time they've been developing the eggs or at the time of laying. It can be nest site or security issues if the female is feeling stressed, and she may not be able to lay or she may hold off on laying and become dehydrated and not be able to lay later on.
It can also be poor nutrition chronically or an increased demand for calcium at that point of laying, for, you know, muscle contractions and for, the calcium to, to kind of shell the eggs and so on. That can cause hypocalcemia, which leads to dystopia as well. And then obesity and reduced muscle tone and obviduct infections can be caused as well, but less commonly.
For treatment, for treating the non-obstructive disease, then it would be correcting husbandry if you have time to do so. But normally, medical intervention is, is the way forward. So rehydrating them and giving them some supportive kind of feeding with, to correct negative energy balance is often good.
So high calorie density, oral tube feed, giving them some fluid therapy and then starting medical treatment if they're not obstructed, and you'll see that on X-ray with a combination of calcium and oxytocin. Just looking at the X-ray, the difference between your follicular stasis, which is, you know, your soft tissue spherical kind of masses in the abdomen, is that you have ovoid or kind of, kind of oval shaped calcified masses in the abdomen. So you can see the calcified shell on those ones and they're not spherical, they're they're oval.
So that's the differentiating factor. And you can see in this X-ray that the extremities and the bone density in them is very poor, so she has unfortunately started absorbing calcium from her bones in order to give birth. But with medical correction, she did give, not give birth but lay her whole clutch of eggs, and a follow-up x-ray is really important to to kind of rule out any retained eggs there.
I'll move on. To the two kind of emerging diseases that we're seeing more and more of, and then we're nearly, nearly there for some question time. But, adenovirus, you'll hear about in bearded dragons, and I think it's really important if you're seeing any number of bearded dragons to always have adenovirus in the back of your mind because it can come up with pretty strange presentations and you can have a kind of head scratcher of a case and you're thinking what is going on here?
It's always worth having this in the back of your mind. It's been reclassified now and it's more accurately a adenovirus instead of adenovirus, but basically it's an immunosuppressive virus which causes all kinds of problems. Generally it's sort of like lethargy and ill thrift, often in juvenile animals that have been recently purchased.
So again, in these big breeding facilities and Going through wholesalers and retailers, in kind of cohousing conditions and sometimes unsanitary conditions, it's very contagious and easily passed from one to the other. So, they often the first sign is that the visit goes off its food, and then sometimes if you, diagnose it, you know, faecal, do a faecal analysis. And you see an overwhelming parasitic infection with normally like pinworm eggs and sometimes coccidia too, and that can be a real alarm bell that you should be looking at the history, the purchase history, how long the animal's been in their care, what kind of collection it's in, and thinking about testing for for adenovirus.
I've come up with a lot of positive ones from a parasitic screen. They can do well for a period of time with really good care, and a lot of these owners are very, very devoted to them and say, you know, their quality of life can be good for a period of time, but it's really important that they're isolated because any other, beardies and indeed some other reptile species can come down with it very easily if they're in the same collection. So I would say it's the single pet animal that's diagnosed, then it's about maintaining quality of life and and giving it good care until such time as that changes.
And if it's an animal in a large collection or a valuable collection, then euthanasia on kind of biosecurity grounds is something to be discussed if quarantine or isolation isn't possible. And it is invariably fatal in the end. There are some kind of strange presentations I put this slide in of the tail amputation because this, Vardy was suspected to have trauma on his tail which got infected and it seemed like a very simple case of a fractured tail.
With an infection, pretty bad infection, and osteomyelitis in the bone and we amputated the tail, but he didn't, he did well initially, but he came back, you know, several weeks, I think a couple of months later, actually, just not right, and we did a faecal screen overwhelmed with with parasites at that stage and tested positive for adenovirus. So they can present with just non-healing infections or ill thrift or very vague signs. The second infectious disease that again, to be very aware of because we're seeing rising numbers of cases is what's called yellow skin disease or yellow fungus.
And that's the the organism behind that is CAV, which is called crispoium anamorph of an easy opsis regi, so a bit of a mouthful but can be or yellow skin disease is what most clients will have read about, if they know about it at all but It presents with a kind of hyperkeratotic lesions and very ulcerated underneath these kind of crusted lesions. When you pull them off, they often have this really distinctive bright yellow exudation appearance underneath the crust. And this is, this is one that you can see, excuse me, that has had the organism start on a lesion on the tail, but you can see the discoloration moving cranially up the body and on one.
Hind limb on that side as well. And then you can see the segment of tail as well that's affected. And basically this is a kind of filamentous fungus that invades tissues locally, really, really invasive, very aggressive, and it is ultimately fatal because it causes multiple, you know, organ failure and depending where it is, that can happen quickly or very slowly.
The treatment unfortunately it also has to be very, very aggressive with debridement or amputation even of affected limbs or tail. But if it's around the head, often that's obviously not an option. And the treatment of choice is a long term treatment with itraconazole, which has severe, can have severe effects on the liver.
And unfortunately, the treatment is so long and side effects so severe that the treatment can actually be fatal too. So it's really, really a poor prognosis. The onset of diagnosis where you're seeing a lesion is often very advanced.
I've written an article on my blog about that if you want to have a look. The last few slides are just really quick case studies of other things that you might see. Periodontal disease is more prevalent or common in bearded dragons, than in other, lizard species because they have what's called acrodont dentition.
So they're gains from the agami family, and they have fixed teeth that aren't replaced over the course of the animal's life. Also of a very thin film of epithelium covering the bottom of the teeth and the actual jawbone. So this is a bearded dragon that was very much loved but fed a pretty poor diet, which is very fruit heavy, and it was told actually that the sugars in the fruit may have contributed to poor periodontal health and ultimately stomatitis and osteomyelitis in the mandible.
Parasitic disease is really common. You should be doing faecal screens very easy to do in-house, a faecal flotation and a direct smear. You should get into the habit of doing that if you're seeing any volume of reptiles because it can tell you a lot about the animal's health.
And in the, in the, microscope slide there. Seeing a lot of pinworms that can be something quite normal. Oxyuric pinworms are not always bad news, but if you're seeing an abundance of them with coccidia and things like that, that can ring alarm bells, and the ectoparasite of concern is, the snake mite, which is the most common reptile mite, you see them there in the skin folds.
This was a suspected inaction that I treated and X-rayed and it looked like an inaction, but it actually turned out to be a liver tumour. Unfortunately, it didn't get . The funds to do histopathology on that.
I don't know what type, but tumours are getting more common. And then other lumps generally can a lot of them can be abscesses, so just external puncture of the skin can lead to infection getting in, and it's just important to say that reptile abscesses and pus case pus, they often need surgical debridement. The difficulty in closing a large wound in reptile is that the skin is not as elastic and triable as or .
Stretched as as kind of mammalian skin, so it's very hard sometimes to get full closure on on a large lump removal, but they do granulate and heal up very, very well. Contact details if anyone does want to get in touch. There's a range there and there's a lot of case studies I put on my blog, not recently, but if you go back to the archives, there's a lot of reptile case studies.
And again, webinar that has a few of my past webinars as well if you want to delve more into clinic disease. But for now, I hope that that kind of gives you a good overview of the motivations of bearded dragon owners and what you need to know, what the kind of specifics of hospital care are nutrition that will help you give the best advice to them and treat them when they do come in. Great.
Thank you very much, Sean, for yet another brilliant webinar, jam packed full of information. We have had some questions come through, but just before we go to questions and comments, the webinar vet team really appreciate your feedback. So if you could spare 30 seconds to complete the feedback survey that hopefully has popped up in a new tab in your browser, that would be fantastic.
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Alternatively, you can add feedback in the comment section on the website. So, the first comment that came through, Sean, towards, the beginning of the presentation, someone has said that clinical husbandry looks very cruel and should be banned. Yeah, I mean, there's, I definitely can talk a lot on ethics and welfare and and what we know about reptiles and what people think about reptiles, that's, you know, what their needs are.
I've shown the sort of extreme versions of each of those systems, and a lot of people will adapt certain aspects of them to their, their, way of keeping their animals. I would agree that that barren environment. Co-housing groups of animals with a single basking source, and, you know, a very, much industrial type arrangement doesn't meet the the needs of those animals, when you compare it to what we should be doing.
But there are pros and cons with some people of adapting a clinic part of the clinical style of cleanliness and and things like that, you know, it's kind of . A clinical substrate, for example, or indeed going to the kind of issue of impaction, we can, we can tell people impactions are the result of poor husbandry. They're not necessarily, you know, the direct result of housing you listed on sand.
But we do know that a lot of people don't get the husbandry right. They don't have full knowledge or control of the temperatures, and maybe it's safer for that kind of client to get the advice. Maybe it would be an idea not to use sand.
So it is, you know, you kind of have to adapt it on a case by case basis and you can use an element of a clinical style and still meet the welfare needs of the animal, but I've deliberately shown the sort of extreme examples of those three styles of ownership. And yeah, I would agree that the the clinical cages I showed are a welfare issue, big time. The next question on the subject of, owner education, do you know of any good online sources of information that vets can recommend to owners?
There's the problem. There's so much information out there, that it's almost becomes, you know, hard to find the good, the good from the bad. You mentioned before the webinar tonight, they see that the RSPCA, you know, and PDSA are doing the job of trying to put on care sheets on the more common reptile species.
But what I often encourage my clients to do, a lot of them are already on online forums and things, is to go on to some of the bearded dragon, . Forums on Facebook, for example, and see what kind of conversations they're having. If the admins are referring the, the members back to, you know, very good file section, which is very comprehensive, and they're correcting people who are putting out, kind of strange ideas or incorrect information a lot.
There are a good few bearded dragon forms on Facebook that are absolutely excellent, and are giving really, really good advice. But I think what the best thing to do, with any reptile owners, best advice to give is find a local specialist reptile shop. So your big commercial pet shops that sell a variety of species often don't have staff that are true reptile experts.
But if you can find a local reptile specific shop, often they have, you know, lots of advice to give and lots of time to give it, and talking to other owners really about what they do is is a really good way. But yeah, just researching online and not believing the first care sheet you come across on Google as gospel. Great.
Thank you, Sean. And then I think the last question before we wrap up the webinar today, what does promation mean? I assume it has nothing to do with Birmingham.
No, no, it's not a bro. It could be, so, broomation is, similar to hibernation, but hibernation is a period of dormancy, a really extreme period of dormancy in cold weather and often northern climates. Broomation is something that, animals, not necessarily only reptiles do.
In warmer climates, either when it gets too hot or when it's the winter season, but it's not like, you know, freezing cold, and it can happen in just periods where the environment is too extreme for them, and it's a kind of a less dormant state, basically where they become a little inactive and stop eating, and it's quite common in captivity, in in bearded dragons at certain times of the year where they just go off their food and there's nothing actually wrong, and you can manipulate the the environmental parameters back. If you question a client and say, well, OK, what's been going on has to be wise, what are your temperatures, and they don't know, and that's a good starting point to to take them. And if they're too low, the chances are, it may be seasonal ruination.
Great. Thank you for clarifying that, Sean. Thank you again for your webinar.
You've taught me so much about exotic pets. So thank you very much for that. And thank you to everyone who attended the live webinar.
It's always great, to see so many people online, and thank you for providing your feedback. Apologies again for the sound issues that we encountered, . So, but once Sean dialled in, hopefully you could hear him as well as I could.
I couldn't experience any problems then. So, and last but not least, thank you to Paul for co-hosting with me on the webinar today. I hope you can join us for another webinar soon.
Next week, we have Matt Gurney, who will be presenting a webinar on capnography. But of course, this weekend, the virtual congress starts tomorrow. So I hope you are able to join us then.