baby beardie behaviors???

[Iguanalady]

raebug
About 1 in 100 dragons can get "pissy" like that in their early months. I have found they eventually just grow out of it but I do not breed these individuals later.

[eyespy]

I don't have access to Penn's library now that I work at home so I don't have copies of Erik Pianka's work handy and am just going by memory here. Reptiles have extremely low cortisol levels when at rest, it's not a commonly produced hormone for them. It can be very difficult to detect cortisol at all in the serum levels of wild beardies when in a calm state. Captive reptiles have many times higher levels, I remember the figure was staggering but don't remember what it was.

We didn't do active research on cortisol at Penn but it was a part of our routine pre- and post-op blood panels to try and monitor the stress levels of our patients. Now that I am rehabbing post-op animals at home I draw the blood but the results don't even come to me, they go to the consulting vets at Penn so I don't keep very careful track these days. I just hear which animals are too stressed out and should be isolated from stimuli such as being able to see other animals from their cage.

[Iguanalady]

Fascinating. If you can think of some titles for me to look up please suggest. I am going to go into the online database of papers and look up cortisol and reptiles tonight. Thanx for the inspiration on a new area of study for me. I think I must be weird. LOL. Studying new things is a fun extracurricular activity for me!

[eyespy]

One thing to remember is that beardies don't have cerebral cortex so their stresses are much more likely to be physiological than psychological. They don't even have "pain memory". They have the pain response to withdraw from a painful stimulus as it is happening, but don't have the pain guarding response of avoiding walking on a broken limb even though they are fully capable of drawing it up and walking 3 legged, most don't "remember" to do so.