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Temperature Gradients with Matt Rendle

Ask anyone how to keep a reptile and their first answer is likely to be ‘hot’. While this is not strictly wrong, our obsession with keeping reptiles warm has slightly skewed our understanding of optimal conditions. Recreating a desert environment that we have never experienced within the parameters of a wooden vivarium is no easy task. Matthew Rendle RVN explains the key to keeping reptiles successfully is providing choice.

Matthew is a veterinarian nurse that has worked with exotics for 30+ years, fronted countless conservation projects across the world and has kept and worked with exotics his entire life. He explained: “Effectively, husbandry for reptiles is extremely mixed but on the most part, temperature is almost always wrong. Reptiles need options. They need hot and cold. Being able to provide a gradient is of paramount importance.”

We are only now starting to understand the interconnectedness of every aspect of husbandry. While a hot and cold end are recommended by pet shops for even the most novice of species, that gradient is rarely drastic enough.

Matthew continued: keep bearded dragons where the hot end isn’t hot enough so they absorb massive amounts of UV and the cold end isn’t cold enough so they can’t digest their food properly. Ectotherms are designed to thermoregulate as they require it. If they are too hot they need to cool down so that meal doesn’t rot inside them. There’s a huge range of what they want to do. If they are reproductively active there will be stages when they want to be hot and stages when they want to be cold so not giving them options is a massive issue.”

“If they have a large meal and theye’re too hot, they need to cool down else they will sit and that bacterium will multiply and it will effectively rot inside them.

When you keep something too hot, all the nutrients go, so you see malnourishment when you keep something too hot, which is difficult to get your head around. Everybody’s gastric juices work at a specific temperature. Mammals are quite straightforward; our body heat keeps us ticking over okay but ectotherms need that option. Especially those that have fast metabolisms like heliotherms. For example, bearded dragons and fence lizards are well suited to that kind of behaviour. In the wild they get hot, use that burst of energy to hunt food and then hide in the undergrowth while they digest it.”

Providing a balance is crucial to keeping a healthy animal. Matthew added: “Previously you would see a lot of reptiles with MBD, now we’re seeing more and more reptiles with UV burns. Now we have brilliant products out there, people don’t realise that some of them are throwing out massive amounts of UV. People often think ‘more is better’.”