Neo's Blog

Neo has reached the 'I really, really want to swim!' stage. Exactly the same as last year! She has been heading straight for the bath as soon as she is let out of her vivarium - and climbs in by herself, even when there's no water in there for her yet! Then she waits patiently for me to go and run her a nice bath. Oh sorry, I mean simulate a 'river' for her to swim down In the wild, if a female iguana cannot find a suitable egg-laying site where they are, they will swim miles up or down a river to search for a 'good' site. (And yes, I have given her a digging box, etc, etc, she's dug in it, sprayed the contents everywhere (multiple times.. i.e. at least once a day!! ) but she's decided she wants to look further afield, just incase there is something better on the banks of the, err, River 'Bath' )

Here she is enjoying a long soak. Notice how round her little belly is looking! Isn't she cute?!? Hehe!


Iguana heaven:

...Or perhaps helps if she has a bit of belly-ache??


'Are you photographing me in the bath? How dare you!'

When Neo is in the bath, she seems to be doing this: swim, rest, swim, rest, swim, rest... repeated over and over until I fish her out, and then she continues to 'swim' in mid-air for a bit! Even when she is plonked on a towel, dried off and let go, she sometimes continues to 'swim' on the bathroom floor for a second or two, until she realises she is no longer in the water, and raises her belly back off the floor to walk properly, finding out that was the reason why she wasn't getting very far! It is quite amusing to watch

Here she is having a splash about:


...and doing some 'proper' swimming!

Although the bath isn't really big enough for her to get a good momentum up (err, probably a good thing ) she does do a few occasional bursts of swimming like this. I'd love to have a bigger, circular bath for her to have a good swim about in! Hmm, someday perhaps...

I have no idea how long she would spend in the bath during her gravid days, but the other day I sat with her for about an hour at a guess, with her climbing in and out of the bath, swimming, resting, swimming, resting, climbing out, sliding back in, repeating this... until the water began to get cooler and so I let the water out. I didn't want her to get too cold. As the water level began to drop, accidentally or not, I don't know, but Neo went over to the plughole and stuck her rear foot in the hole!!! It stopped the water going out as fast... then when only about an inch of water remained in the bathtub, she appeared to give up and removed her foot, moving back over to the other end of the bath. She still wouldn't climb out by herself though!! She looked up at me as if to say 'Why did you do that? You ruined my perfectly good pool ' before I scooped her up in a towel. Aww. Sorry Neo, you can do it again tomorrow!

...And what better way to end a day of the iguana-swimming-Olympics?? Find a nice, soft, warm, dry place to curl up for the night... and what is better than... Jenny's dressing-gown!!!


(Yeah, she is in there... see the iguana-shaped lump?!? She's still in there now as I'm writing this!! )