Argentine Black and White Tegu — Fact Sheet

Salvator merianae · Argentine Black and White Tegu

Full care guide and sources

📋 At a glance

🏠 Enclosure

• Enclosure planning dimensions: 300 x 150 x 150 cm
• Housing: One animal per enclosure

🪨 Substrate and furnishings

Offer at least 30 cm of compactable soil-based substrate, deeper where a burrow is intended. Soil, sand, clay, and leaf litter can be blended to hold structure. Test retaining walls and furnishings against the strength of a digging adult.

Include a broad basking platform, cool hide, humid burrow, visual barriers, robust logs, and opportunities to search for food. Avoid lightweight decor, exposed foam, loose cables, fragile glass, heat rocks, and anything that can collapse into a tunnel.

💡 Lighting

• High-output linear UVB plus broad bright visible lighting
• Ferguson Zone 3; target UVI about 3-4 at basking
• 12-14 h active-season photoperiod; guard every lamp

🌡️ Temperature

• Basking spot: 52-57 °C
• Daytime air: 32-35 °C
• Cool zone: 24-29 °C
• Night: 20-23 °C

💧 Humidity and water

Maintain 70-80% ambient humidity with a burrow or humid hide around 90-100%. Deep substrate should be moist enough to hold a tunnel but never waterlogged or sour. Surface drying and good air exchange are compatible with a humid lower layer.

Provide a heavy water container large enough for drinking and optional soaking, but design it so the tegu cannot tip it or flood the enclosure. Replace fouled water promptly; large tegus often defecate in bowls.

🪳 Feeding

Tegus are omnivores whose proportions change with age. Juveniles may receive roughly 90% animal foods and 10% vegetation, while a practical adult Argentine-tegu pattern is about 60% varied animal foods, 30% vegetables, and 10% fruit.

Use whole prey of appropriate size, insects, snails, eggs in moderation, lean unseasoned animal foods as part of a rotation, dark leafy greens, squash, green beans, and other safe vegetables. Limit sugary fruit, fatty rodents, processed meat, and raw ground-meat-only diets. Never feed wild-caught prey or food seasoned for people.

Hatchlings may eat about five times weekly, juveniles four, subadults three, and most adults twice weekly. Dust insects and boneless meats with calcium, gut-load feeders, and use a multivitamin conservatively. Weigh the animal monthly and adjust portions before obesity develops.

☠️ Safety

Use target training, a barrier board, and predictable feeding tools. Never hand-feed. Teach the tegu to enter a shift box and separate feeding from door-opening cues. During necessary restraint, control the head and support the torso and tail without compressing the chest.

Children should not handle tegus. Keep hands away from the mouth, and never assume a familiar animal is safe during feeding, breeding, shedding, pain, or abrupt waking from dormancy.

🩺 Health — warning signs

Frequent preventable problems are obesity, metabolic bone disease, burns, dehydration despite high humidity, respiratory disease from cold wet housing, substrate ingestion, broken claws or rostral wounds, retained shed, mouth trauma, reproductive disease, and parasites.

Urgent signs include a soft jaw, limb weakness, tremors, persistent swelling, laboured breathing, blood in stool, repeated straining, severe aggression linked to pain, or sustained weight loss. Quarantine new animals and arrange fecal testing and a baseline examination with a reptile veterinarian.