Tuesday November 17, 2009

Stuck on geckos

By MICHAEL CHEANG

A slimy love affair – a gecko breeder tells how it all started.

CICAKMAN wouldn’t stand a chance against Firdaus Karim. Sure, that fictitious local superhero wannabe may be able to climb walls and talk like Saiful Apek, but put him up against Firdaus and the 31-year-old gecko breeder would have him in a small Plexiglas enclosure eating worms out of a plastic container in no time.

After all, Firdaus’ hobby is collecting geckos and not just your average wall-climbing green skinned cicak (lizard) you commonly see at home. Firdaus’ reptiles consist mostly of leopard geckos, which come in a myriad of colours and can grow up to 27.5cm in size.

Describing himself as the sort of person who would go insane if he did not have at least one pet animal in his home, Firdaus has tried everything – from cats, hamsters, guinea pigs to fishes, snakes and tortoises, but it wasn’t until he discovered geckos a year ago that he found his true love.

Happy together: ‘It’s like Pokemon ... you’ve just got to have them all!’ says Firdaus Karim.

“I remember the first time I held a leopard gecko in my hands ... I could not stop touching and holding it! That night, I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about it!” he recalls.

Soon after that first encounter, he bought his first six leopard geckos and has not looked back since, amassing an impressive number of over 200 geckos. In fact, he has since moved on from being a mere collector, to actually breeding them and selling them part-time via his website – The Gecko Shop (thegeckoshop.com).

With such a large number of geckos in his collection, you might think that his gecko-breeding “facility” would be huge. In reality, Firdaus keeps his animals in a small storeroom in his Puchong home in Selangor, all comfortably housed in hundreds of Plexiglas containers stacked high like little gecko apartments. These “apartments” are equipped with moist boxes, water bowls, hiding areas (usually just a simple Styrofoam container), food bowls (which are filled with a variety of insects, including mealworms, superworms and crickets) and calcium bowls – in short, everything you need to keep a gecko healthy and happy.

To him, the gecko is the perfect pet. “Geckos are a lot easier to take care of than dogs and cats, requiring only food, water and adequate shelter – elements that are important towards the animal’s survival,” explains Firdaus, whose wife and son are perfectly comfortable around the geckos (as long as he doesn’t let them scuttle around the house freely).

He also thinks that geckos are perfect pets for people who may be allergic to mammals like dogs and cats. “Many people don’t like reptiles. But, let’s say you have asthma and can’t keep cats, dogs or anything furry, but you still want a pet to have an attachment to. That’s where reptiles or fish come in handy. However, you can’t touch or play with fish.

Slimy beauty: An Australian knob-tailed gecko.

“It is also easy and cheaper to keep them. For the same amount of money used to keep a cat or a dog per month, I could use it to keep a few hundred reptiles!”

According to him, breeding leopard geckos is not that hard. “As long as they are mature, and you fulfil requirements such as shelter, food, water and calcium, they will be happy in that container. Then, when you put a male and female together, they will mate,” he says, adding that a male gecko can live up to 25 years, but females tend to drop dead in half that time. “A productive female can give about 20 to 24 eggs per season, and because they are so easy to incubate and hatch, my success rate is almost 100%.”

There’s more to breeding geckos than just bringing two lizards together for some “sexy time” though. The greatest appeal of leopard geckos is their variety of colours and skin patterns, each stemming from a different mutation strain found in the gecko’s blood.

“The trick is to learn which combination of mutations will produce a certain kind of mutation. To do so, you have to learn and understand the genetics of the parent, or it will produce an ugly baby that no one will buy,” says Firdaus, who got his knowledge by reading books on genetics, and from conversing with other breeders on the Internet.

“For instance, let’s say the male and female gecko has five different mutations each. You must make sure the baby gecko inherits ALL these mutations, so that it will be worth even more.”

There are almost 300 different mutations within the leopard gecko species right now, and Firdaus says gecko prices fluctuate depending on the rarity of the mutation and the gender of the reptile.

“The more symmetrical and colourful the reptile is, and the cleaner or more intense the colours, the more expensive it becomes. Some of the rarer mutations can cost up to US$3,000 (RM10,500) an animal!” he explains. “The price is normally higher if the mutation is new – that means there are only very few reptiles in existence with that particular strain of mutation. Of course, as time goes by and more of the animals are bred, then the price will drop.”

Wide variety: A leopard gecko in Firdaus’ collection. Leopard geckos come in a myriad of colours and can grow up to 27.5cm in size.

Firdaus currently has more than 200 mutations in his collection already, having spent more than RM90,000 importing them from other countries like the United States and Taiwan. At the rate which he’s breeding his own geckos, he reckons he’ll be able to start exporting his reptiles next year. For now though, he usually sells the reptiles he has bred to local collectors and friends. However, he is not out to make big bucks from this, he says, and is contented to just make enough to cover the cost of his hobby.

Firdaus currently has two gecko goals – firstly, is to own every single mutation available.

“Most collectors would try to collect as many colours as possible. It’s like Pokemon ... you’ve just got to have them all!” he says with a grin. “I have also added other species of geckos to my collection, including African fat-tailed geckos and knob-tailed geckos, because I wanted something more challenging to breed. Right now I have five different species of gecko, although the leopard geckos are still my main focus.”

His ultimate goal, however, is to breed a leopard gecko with his own unique strain of mutation. “That is the ultimate goal for me. I want to be able to name a mutation I created personally,” he says.

He also hopes that keeping geckos (or reptiles in general) as pets will take off in Malaysia in a big way in the future. “The reptile pet market is still small here, but it is growing. Reptiles are now widely accepted as mainstream pets, especially in the United States,” he says. “I would suggest that if you want to get a pet gecko, try getting it from a breeder instead of a pet store. A breeder would be able to answer any questions you might have, and teach you how to take care of your gecko better.”

He also suggests that a potential gecko owner should do more research on the reptile. “If you want to start raring geckos, you should do more research. By doing so, you’ll get more hooked to them!”

For details, log on to thegeckoshop.com.