Walk past the tank an hour after lights-out and your beardie is already flat on the substrate, pale as sand and barely moving. How much do bearded dragons sleep is one of the first questions new owners ask, usually because their dragon sleeps far more than they expected. A healthy adult sleeps 8–12 hours a…
Every keeper has stood in the garden holding a fat grasshopper and thought about free food. So can bearded dragons eat wild bugs from outside? No, and the reasons go well beyond the usual one-line warning about pesticides. One group of backyard insects can kill a healthy adult dragon within the hour. The rest cause…
Let’s cut right to the chase: if you are expecting the kind of affectionate cuddles you’d get from a golden retriever, a bearded dragon is going to disappoint you. They are solitary desert reptiles, and their brains simply aren’t wired to crave physical touch from another living thing. So, do bearded dragons actually like being…
A bearded dragon turns up one morning with a chunk missing from the end of its tail, or the tip has gone dark and shrivelled overnight. The first thing almost every keeper asks is whether their tails grow back. They do not. Unlike a gecko, a beardie cannot drop and regrow its tail, so whatever…
A few dark, puffy scales on your dragon’s belly are easy to overlook until the skin underneath starts to look wet or raw. Bearded dragon scale rot is a bacterial skin infection that sets in when scales sit against damp, dirty, or cold surfaces for too long. Caught in the first few days it usually…
Drop a bearded dragon into a few inches of warm water and you usually get one of two reactions. Some flatten out, puff up slightly, and paddle across like it is the most natural thing in the world. Others freeze, scrabble at the sides, and make it obvious they want out. So can bearded dragons…
That small grey dot on top of your dragon’s head sits dead centre between the two regular eyes. Plenty of new keepers spot it for the first time and assume something is wrong. It can look like a scar, a flake of stuck shed, or a wound that needs treating. In almost every case it…
A bearded dragon that suddenly spends most of the day tucked under a rock or wedged into a cave worries almost any keeper. In most cases bearded dragon hiding is normal behaviour, not a warning sign. Wild dragons hide constantly to control their body temperature, dodge predators, and rest. The question that matters is not…
A bearded dragon will sometimes push both eyes outward until they look ready to pop out of its head, hold it for a second or two, then let them settle back. The first time it happens it looks like a medical emergency. Bearded dragon eyes bulging is, in the large majority of cases, a normal…