The Gecko Chronicles - II

Note: The Gecko Chronicles are not posted sequentially, but you can find them all batched in a tidy little group at the left.

MEET SPOT
Spot is our Spotted Leopard Gecko. He’s about ten inches long and spotted in the same manner as a giraffe. He’s not very emotionally demonstrative and spends most of his time inside his “cave.” This is what leads me to believe that he’s a boy. He also has the tendency to stop eating once he’s satisfied, regardless of how many crickets are still sashaying about. Another early indicator of maleness.

I’m not sure how old he is but it seems we’ve had him forever. He started out as a pet for my older son who is allergic to all things furry. Initially, Spot would eat both live crickets and bloodworms (which is, I think, a euphemism for “maggots”). The bloodworms could be kept in the refrigerator and had a longer “shelf life” than the crickets because they themselves did not need to eat or drink to stay alive. (I don’t even know if there were alive. They sure were ugly, though.)

Somewhere along the line, Spot lost his taste for bloodworms and become a strict Cricketarian. The crickets are purchased live, dumped into his glass tank, and then Darwinian theory takes over. Sometimes it takes Spot four or five days to eat all the crickets. In the meantime, they chirp.

It is this chirping that ultimately caused us to move Spot’s tank from my son’s room into a more public area. The crickets are loud and they’d wake him in the middle of the night (my son, not Spot). Once the gecko moved out of my son’s room, guess who’s responsibility he became?

Right.