The proper husbandry of a Satanic Leaf-tailed Gecko is individually housed. Their low intra-species aggression makes this easy to ignore. But if we are truly the keepers of ideal husbandry then we have the obligation to accept and promote the highest standards. In this episode I lay out the case for proper husbandry for Satanic Leaf-tailed Geckos being individual keeping.
Transcript (more or less):
Branch Demon Podcast
Episode 6: Why Satanic Leaf-tailed Geckos Live Alone
Misty Mountain Phants | branchdemon.com
As soon as we decide to get a pet – whether dog, bird, frog, or phant – we are faced with the challenge of deciphering its social needs.
These may not be as noticeable or as easy to measure as temperature, food, and water. But they are just as important to an animal’s well-being. And each species can have vastly different needs.
To leave a dog alone without human or other dog companionship is cruel.
To leave a chameleon alone without human or other chameleon companionship is good husbandry.
Right now, in the phant community, we are still working out where Uroplatus phantasticus falls on that spectrum. And that’s what this episode is about.
I want to have a conversation about cohabitation. About whether the practice of keeping phants together – pairs, trios, breeding groups – is something we should be normalizing, or something we should be moving away from.
I want to have this conversation acknowledging that some people listening to this have already made a choice. They have phants cohabitating right now. They have years of experience doing it this way. They have infrastructure built around it. And they feel it is working for them.
I get that. Yvette and I were there when she started Misty Mountain Phants.
We started working with phants about fifteen years ago and have kept them in many different conditions – individually, in pairs, and in trios. We have had the pressures of being breeders with a sizable population for the last thirteen years. For the last eight years, a serious breeding facility.
I share those numbers so you know this isn’t hypothetical. We have put the time in to truly test the options and form our conclusions.
And our conclusion is that proper husbandry is individual keeping.
I’m going to lay out the thinking that led us there. Because this argument is a chain. If any link is wrong, the conclusion might be wrong. But if the chain holds, then the conclusion holds – whether it’s convenient for us or not. And if you disagree with my conclusion, I invite you to tell me which step of my logic you feel is not true. My goal here is not to push a narrative, but to refine my husbandry. Let me know if you see something I don’t.
This is Episode 6 of the Branch Demon Podcast: Why They Live Alone.
ACT 1: THE LOGICAL CASE
Step One: Cohabitation Is Always Stress
I’ll start not with phants, but with a question that applies to any animal.
Why would any animal cohabitate with others of their own kind in the first place?
Think about what that means. You are looking for the same perfect perching branches. The same food. The same water. The same shelter. The same mates. This goes for any animal – including humans.
There is always competition and stress when you have to deal with others of your own kind trying to survive in the same space. Who gets to sit in the best spot? Who gets to pick the first donut, or cricket, or whatever?
Cohabitation is stressful. I don’t think I am uncovering any uncommon knowledge there.
So why would any animal do it?
The answer is: they don’t, unless they have to.
Many animals are solitary. It is actually a special situation when animals cohabitate voluntarily. And that situation only exists when the species has developed a benefit that outweighs what it costs.
Step Two: What Makes Cohabitation Worth It
There are many examples of species where cohabitation makes biological sense.
Meerkats warn each other. A group has more eyes scanning for predators than a single animal does. The stress of group living is outweighed by the survival benefit of shared vigilance.
Fish schools gather in high densities so that your individual chance of being eaten goes down. The more fish around you, the less likely the predator picks you. Cohabitation as a survival strategy.
Wolf packs and lion prides can hunt more effectively together. They can take prey that no individual could bring down alone.
Ants and bees have formed colonies that can protect each other and do amazing things. Humans have too, though we have this strange sense of not liking each other that ants and bees seem to have avoided.
Emerald tree skinks form family groups. Some breeders refuse to sell a single skink because the animals show actual stress when separated. That’s a social species. Cohabitation isn’t just acceptable for them – it’s necessary. Now, to be honest, I am not sure what the benefit of being in a group is for the Emerald Tree Skink so I fully admit I am trusting the judgment of the breeders who work with them and that is what they say.
Step Three: What Benefit Do Phants Get?
Now. Apply that same question to phants.
When two phants share a cage, the cost is clear. Competition for resources. Stress. One animal getting prime spots. The other making do. Even if there are many sufficient spots that would be fine for sleeping, one of the phants still chooses first.
What’s the benefit of them living together?
Let’s name the candidates and work through them.
Defense? If there was some benefit to gathering, we could look for it in their behavior. But there is no defense benefit to bringing them together. In Madagascar, they’re not huddling for mutual protection, warning each other when one is drinking, or drawing a predator’s attention away from a female and her baby. They’re spaced apart.
Hunting advantage? Phants are ambush predators. Solitary hunters. A second phant in the territory is competition for prey, not assistance. Now, if we had evidence of a roving band of phants taking down a lemur then I would have to re-evaluate my position – and be more careful when I hike in Ranamafana.
Well, what if we just don’t know what it is yet? It could still exist. Okay. That’s a fair position.
Step Four: What Does Madagascar Tell Us?
That’s where field observation is valuable.
I have spent time in the rainforests of Madagascar watching these animals. And what I can tell you is this: Phants do not hang out in groups. They sleep alone. They hunt alone. There is no draw for them to find each other and hang out.
They are solitary. Consistently. When I’m out at night looking for phants, I find individuals. Well-spaced. Each living their own life.
That doesn’t mean they never interact – of course they do. During breeding season, males seek out females. There’s courtship, mating. Then they separate again.
But day to day? Month to month? They are alone. And not just tolerating it. They aren’t lonely. That is their preferred state.
So we have a species with no identified social benefit. No observable social drive. No affection bonding. No cooperative behavior. No group defense.
Step Five: The Logical Conclusion
When you put those things together, the conclusion is straightforward.
Cohabitation carries cost for every animal. Cohabitation is only worthwhile when there’s a benefit that outweighs that cost. We cannot identify a benefit that phants receive from being together. Therefore, we’re asking them to pay a cost with no return.
That’s the chain. If any link is wrong, I want to hear it. But I haven’t found a weak link in fifteen years of keeping these animals.
“But Mine Seem Fine”
So now the question will come up. Sure, they pay the cost of cohabitation, but how high is that cost really? They seem to eat, drink, poop, and reproduce. Phants have been kept together for years. In most cases there are no injuries, no fighting – they seem fine.
Here’s the tricky thing about phants and stress. They’re incredibly stoic animals. They don’t scream. Well, okay, that isn’t 100% true. But outside of rare physical conflicts, they don’t show obvious distress the way a dog or cat might. And what stress behaviors they do show are mostly happening at night when you’re asleep.
We can see two geckos in a cage, see no fighting, no injuries, and think: they’re fine, they’re getting along.
But even those that seem to get along – one of them got to choose their sleeping spot first. Sometimes you hear them screeching at each other. Is that healthy? Or is that conflict? In the Misty Mountain Phants breeding facility we have seen behavior we are sure is bullying behavior.
The absence of visible catastrophe is not the same as thriving.
And here’s the question that nobody can answer cleanly yet: How long are these animals supposed to live?
We know our cohabitating phants can live many years. But if we don’t know the upper limit of what individual, enriched keeping can produce, we can’t use “long life” as evidence that cohabitation isn’t costing them something. We’re measuring against an unknown baseline. That’s not a knock on anyone’s husbandry. It’s just an honest assessment of what we know and what we don’t. Although Yvette and I are working on challenging that baseline. We’ll report back either way.
ACT 2: TWO CONVERSATIONS
I want to speak to two different groups of people here.
First, to Keepers:
If you are listening to this series and you have one phant, or you’re about to get your first phant – this part is for you.
Our whole purpose and mission when we keep a pet is to give them the best husbandry possible. The challenge of running a breeding operation with all the adults, babies, infrastructure constraints – that is a breeder problem. Not yours.
You don’t have those constraints.
You have freedoms that Yvette and I – with our facility and our breeding responsibilities – do not have right now. You can give one phant a space that would be impossible to scale across a serious breeding operation.
One phant in a beautifully planted 2x2x4 cage, with multiple branch highways and automated environmental control, living without competition for a single resource? That animal is thriving in a way that most breeding facilities can’t yet offer their adults.
If you want to get another phant, don’t make your original suddenly have to share everything. In practice, two phants in one cage means splitting resources, splitting enrichment, and introducing a competition dynamic that doesn’t benefit either animal.
Two phants in two cages? That’s a completely different conversation. That’s two animals each getting everything they need.
That is the way to do it.
The phant community is working out of a small cage, cohabitation-accepting mindset. I would encourage you to leap ahead instead of lagging behind.
To Breeders:
This part of the conversation is harder.
Small cages and cohabitation allow us to keep the bloodlines we need to produce babies that help the community grow. Yvette and I live the economics. The space constraints are real. The infrastructure challenge is real.
But here is the thing I want to introduce into the discussion. We breeders have two separate questions to answer. The first is: what is your current setup? The second is: what husbandry do you present to others as the standard?
Those don’t have to be the same answer. And pretending they do is where the community gets stuck.
If you’re getting long lives out of your geckos, why change?
Here’s my response to that: First, we do not know how long they are supposed to live. So we don’t actually know if we’re giving them a long life or just a life. We are measuring against an unknown ideal.
But more importantly – our purpose, supposedly, is to offer the best possible living environment for our geckos. And added to that, we are the examples others look to when modeling their own husbandry. What we practice becomes what people copy.
This means that what we present as the standard matters even more than what we happen to be doing right now in our facilities.
Once the evidence was laid out, Yvette and I never wavered on the conviction that phants should be kept separately. But it took time to adjust our infrastructure to accommodate that conviction in our own breeding rooms. There was a period where we were forced to keep some together while we expanded caging. We separated them as soon as the new cages were set up. The point is that it didn’t happen immediately.
Just because you are working toward the ideal doesn’t mean you are being hypocritical sharing what the ideal is.
What would make you a hypocrite is defending the non-ideal as ideal, to protect your own convenience.
We need to let go of the attachment to the idea that the best husbandry is whatever we are doing at the moment. The best husbandry is what we are all working toward. And that is what we should be putting forward as community best practices. That way, people know what to shoot for.
Right now, Yvette and I are working on getting our breeding facility to where each adult has at least a 2′ by 18 inch by 3 foot enclosure to themselves. It isn’t going to happen immediately. It is a methodical march toward that goal. Can that happen with the space and numbers we have right now? No. Which means we move to a larger space or cut down the numbers we keep so they can be in the enclosures we want for them. But for someone starting right now – I am going to tell them how to start where we are working to end up.
ACT 3: THE LEADERSHIP WARNING
There is another dynamic to keep in mind.
As much as established breeders may resist moving forward, newcomers resist being told to just do it the way it has always been done. That is just human nature. And so the leadership position is constantly being challenged by newcomers.
Here is what I know from watching communities evolve over the last few decades: If we hold back husbandry recommendations for our own convenience, the leadership of Uroplatus husbandry will be taken by whoever isn’t encumbered by our constraints.
It might be a TikToker. It might be a YouTuber. It might be whatever platform comes next. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it will be someone who has one phant, and the freedom to give that one phant everything, and who is not carrying the weight of defending their own infrastructure choices.
If we are not aggressively championing the best husbandry then we are leaving a vacuum.
Here’s the thing. The rebellious energy of new hobbyists can sniff out when the older generation is soft. When established voices are gatekeeping to protect their own comfort. When the experts are presenting “this works for me” as the same thing as “this is best for the Uroplatus.”
Those two things are not the same. And eventually someone is going to say that out loud. Loudly. And the established community will look like they knew and said nothing.
The evidence for individual keeping is clear. Phants are not social animals. Their natural history is unambiguous. The logic of cohabitation cost without benefit is airtight. The benefit is only to the keeper’s desire to keep more.
I am not pushing individual keeping because it is a passion project of mine. I am presenting the evidence and coming to the logical conclusion.
Anyone can challenge that logic. I’ve already told you which links are in the chain. If you can break one of them, the conclusion changes. That is how honest argument works.
But the response to an airtight argument cannot be community silence.
The right answer is always to push husbandry forward and champion the best practices whether they are convenient or not. The breeders who do that are the ones who get to define what the next stage of this community looks like. The ones who don’t will find themselves catching up to a standard set by someone who never had a stake in the old way. The phant community is not new, but we aren’t very big. So things move slower and the names don’t change as fast. That makes it easier to not push. But if we discipline ourselves to accept the responsibility of leading towards the best husbandry possible then we have earned our place in guiding our community.
To those purchasing phants: You are actually the most powerful force in raising our community standards. Words are empty. The wallet speaks. When you ask breeders how their adults are housed, when you ask whether babies were raised individually, when you make your purchasing decision based on the answers – that is what changes the standard. Faster than any podcast can.
Uroplatus phantasticus are solitary animals. They sleep alone and they hunt alone in the wild. Beyond mating, there is no draw for them to find each other and hang out. We cannot identify a benefit they receive from each other’s company. We can identify the costs.
Individual keeping isn’t a luxury upgrade. It’s the baseline.
At Misty Mountain Phants, every phant is housed individually from hatching.
I’m Bill Strand. This is the Branch Demon Podcast.
Enjoy your stay in the Night Forest.
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Phants available at mistymountainphants.com