The Cohabbing Myth

If you've not heard the term "cohabbing", it refers to the practice of keeping more than one crested gecko in an enclosure.  The myth, as it relates to this method of housing crested geckos, is that this species should be housed alone, and not in an enclosure with other crested geckos. While I don't go out of my way to correct every bit of gecko-related nonsense I see posted on social media, this is one that is not only total BS, it's also bad for the hobby, as it attempts to unnecessarily complicate the care of an incredibly simple species to keep.  These people won't be told such nonsense when asking about leopard geckos or other species, so they'll end up with a species of gecko that's actually more difficult to keep.  It also causes new crested gecko owners to buy multiples of the food and supplies that they would normally need, not to mention spending double or triple the time feeding and cleaning.

Why?  Long story short, I've seen posts insinuating that the geckos will harm one another, cause stress and that males will continue to harass females in order to breed with them.  This is all complete nonsense and I have over 20 years of "cohabbing" experience on a large scale to back it up.


When or how did this start?
Cohabbing is a term created within the crested gecko hobby, on Facebook, sometime in the late 2010's.  This was around the time I started talking publicly about our practice of raising babies individually, and how they grow considerably faster this way.

When kept individually, the rate of growth is much faster it would be in the wild,  to the point of causing geckos grow to a larger adult size than they would if raised at a natural pace.  After doing this for a few years, I actually started advertising that our geckos were raised individually, which is a good thing because every gecko we sell will be well-started and confident eaters - not something you expect coming from a large scale breeder.  I was the only crested gecko breeder I had ever heard of trying this method, and everyone else was having plenty of success raising them in groups at that time. I had no idea that my (at the time, radical) method of raising our most prized geckos was going to become mandatory husbandry protocol. :-)

Somehow, faster growth when housed individually got spun into people claiming it's actually dangerous to house crested in groups - never mind the fact that literally everyone breeding crested geckos housed them in small groups up until a few years prior.  Before long, they came up with a name for this "controversial" practice: Cohabbing.


Below is a list of reasons the self-anointed experts say "cohabbing" is bad for geckos:

1. "Cohabbing works until it doesn't."
What does that mean?  No one knows. :-)  The people spreading this nonsense typically only talk in anecdotes and never actually explain themselves - especially when pressed by someone who has the actual experience to know they're only repeating something they read.  It's risky to elaborate when your goal is to look like an expert and you're fully aware that you don't know what you're talking about, so they keep it vague. :-)

2. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."
More vague, anecdotal words of wisdom that tell us nothing - but they do sound like something a wise old person would say. :-)  


If only people would apply this nugget of wisdom to the act of handing out advice on things with which one has no real world experience with. 

3. "Crested geckos are solitary creatures."
Apparently our 5,000 breeders tend to sleep in piles together in the same hide because they don't believe the bad breeding advice posted on social media. :-)


4. "Just because cohabbing works for someone else, doesn't mean it will for you."
Crested geckos are the same species wherever they are - none of them can read the nonsense posted on social media, so you're safe keeping them in groups regardless of where you live or who you are.  If you're a halfway responsible keeper and you feed your geckos adequately, you can safely house similar sized geckos in small groups - just like we've been doing here since 2003.

Cohabbing - The Reality

Safety
It is incredibly safe to keep geckos of the same size in an enclosure together, provided you're not putting two or more sexually mature males in the same enclosure (a visible bulge means they're mature or are maturing).  In that situation, there most likely will be fighting or bullying, unless the males started living together before they became sexually mature. 

Interesting fact: Mature males that were housed together prior to puberty (bulge appearing) will rarely fight, even with mature females in the cage.   We've had multiple customers set up large cages of juveniles with 2-3 males and 2-3 females and had great luck with them into adulthood, even with breeding, though it's nearly impossible to know who the parents are.


Breeding Groups
I currently have several thousand breeding geckos housed in groups of 1.3 or 1.4 (that's 1 male with 3 or 4 females) and the incidence of fighting or injury is almost non-existent. We might see 1 or 2 minor injuries some years, and some years there are none.  If I were to go through during the day and open 100 breeder enclosures at random, I would probably find piles of geckos sleeping on top of one another in 95 or more of them.

Our breeder males are left in the cages year-round.  Contrary to internet lore, they don't run around trying to mate with the females all year round.  Breeding activity is signaled by hormones.  When females aren't receptive or in-season, they won't put off the pheromones to entice the malee.

Occasionally, we'll have a female stake her claim to the nest box and prevent other females from using it.  In that situation, you'll find eggs on the floor repeatedly, which can help to clue you in that this might be happening.  Once I've confirmed we have a nest box bully, we'll move her into a group with females larger than her, or into a cage of her own.  I've never seen females injure each other.

Another thing to note - when crested geckos breed, the male often bites the back of the female's head in order to get things lined up, down at the other end.  This may look rough, or like he's attacking her, but they are wild animals and that is how it's done at times.  Other times, they can be very creative, as shown above (they stayed like that for 20 minutes, just FYI).

Younger Geckos
With hatchling to subadult sizes, you will see better rate of growth - maybe even an unnatural rate of growth - when they're housed alone.  For geckos I want to grow out fast, I do house them alone, but that doesn't make housing them in groups a bad thing, and it most certainly doesn't make it unnatural.

When you're raising young geckos individually, there is quite a large trade-off in terms of time and money...you're making more cups of food, cleaning or replacing more water bowls, cleaning more enclosures, you're spending more time overall, and they take up more space. For a lot of breeders, and most hobbyists, it's probably not worth raising them individually. And in all reality, captive geckos raised in groups are still going to grow much faster than they ever would in the wild.


What do professional breeders say in private conversations about Cohabbing?

One of us will typically use the term "cohabbing" in a sentence in an effort to make the other one laugh. Serious breeders don't spend their time talking about something this ridiculous.

What do the people posting this nonsense on social media say when confronted for spreading misinformation?

Because internet experts never like to admit it when they get called out for handing out BS advice (always based on something they read, not on actual experience), they will actually double down and continue to repeat the anecdotes above. 

If someone tells you cohabbing is a bad idea after being confronted with all the facts pointed out on this page, that's who you're dealing with - an internet expert who can't admit they were repeating nonsense they read online.  Needless to say, I'd get my advice elsewhere.


What do I say to someone who tells me I'm a bad keeper for keeping my crested geckos together?

Ask them where they heard that and then stop talking and listen to what they say.  Their response will tell you everything to know about that person and where they got the advice they're handing out. 



Chips (bottom) starting the "Chips" lineage. Photo circa 2006
While it might look like she's desperately trying to flee, these two Kama Sutra afficionados held this pose for a solid 20 minutes.  Long enough for me to run around trying to find my Fuji digital camera - because iPhones didn't exist yet - and then come back and be completely blown away that they weren't moving when I started snapping pics.

Fun Fact: The males don't always have too bite and hold on.  Sometimes the female takes over.