TheCat,
There are many factors that contribute to the colour of a gecko. You state nothing of your husbandry above.
What temperature is the hot spot?
What temperature does the cage drop to at night?
What do you feed the gecko?
What do you feed the prey items?
What calcium supplementation do you use?
The geckos tail looks thinner in the second picture, is it possible that the gecko is ill?
Is the gecko housed alone or in a group?
How fast did the colour change?
What are you keeping the gecko on for substrate?
Clowfishie: in the first picture that gecko was well over 30g, and his colour (all other factors aside) should not have changed this much.
Greg: All of our leopards are kept with hot spots that reach 95 degrees, ambient temperatures range between 81 - 88 degrees.
Hilde: Our Red Stripe Line geckos do change colour in the breeding season, due to both stress of being caged with other geckos, and the stresses of breeding. NONE of our adults have shown the amount of colour change that these pictures represent.
Regius: That gecko was incubated between 87 - 89 degrees (in our male incubator) for temperature sexing. It is true that incubation temperature can influence gecko colouration as stated on Ron Trempers web site (
LeopardGecko.com) and outlined in the Leopard Gecko manual. Earlier this season we used the "Ron Tremper" incubation method and had less then stellar results, we tried this with a total of eight clutches. As for pictures of the geckos parents, click
HERE for pictures of the adults that produced this gecko. The father is the sixth gecko down, in the picture he is well over 18 months old and the picture was taken in the middle of the breeding season, this is as dark as he gets.
Thanks,
Matthew Charlton
High Quality Reptiles