My ornate uro glass surfs for long periods of time every day. I've tried everything to narrow down what he could be needing. Here's his setup:
- He in a 4'x2'x2' PVC enclosure
- 95-100F on the hot end, 80-85F on the cool end
- Clay+soil+sand substrate
- T5 HO 10.0 UVB covering ~80% of the enclosure
- Two 80W mercury vapor bulbs for basking with surface temps between 120-130 at different basking spots
- Grow light for added brightness
- Lots of rocks, hides, and dig areas
- Enclosure spot cleaned daily
- Feeding him various greens dusted with vitamins, calcium, and calcium D3 on different days, lentils once a week, flowers every once in a while as a treat
When he's surfing, I've tried giving him more food or taking him out to hang out with me for a bit. He's not very skittish, but he doesn't like staying still with me and instead wants to run constantly. When I take him out, he doesn't immediately start surfing again when he goes back home, but I think it's just because he needs to warm up again, because he'll often start up again after basking for a couple minutes.
The only thing left that I can think of is that he simply doesn't recognize that there's glass on the front side of the enclosure, so what I'm attempting to do to troubleshoot that is covering the lower portion of the glass with construction paper so that it's a solid color at his height. The paper has only been up for about an hour, but I haven't noticed him glass surfing at all in that time even though he was actively glass surfing as I was putting it up.
So, are uros like water lizards in that they just can't comprehend that a solid surface can also be transparent? I've heard of uros glass surfing, but I've never read anything that would suggest that they might do this for the same reasons that water dragons run into glass.
