Caging...
Here's what I've had on The Tokay Page since it's been up and running.
I house them in tanks and cages in my lizard room, which is a nice sized room over our attached garage. I have 7 ten gallon tanks, each housing one or two tokays each, and two 4 compartment units that house either one or two tokays each. I've had them in larger enclosures before, but would encounter a good number of altercations between the geckos in those cages. It was like the more they had, the more they wanted "all to themselves".
Ideally, I try to clean 4 cages a night (and then the odd one along with the other 4 on
Saturdays). I find it's easier to keep them clean that way. Then I try to spot clean them daily, or at least every other day.The cages are furnished with corkbark sheets and tubes and silk plants (because I don't have time to deal with non-feeder bugs). If I only had a few cages in the room, I'd consider putting heat lamps on the cages. As it is right now with all the iguanas in the room with their heat sources, the room stays quite warm through the night, and gets up to 85F, sometimes even 95F in the summer.
UPDATE 11/3/99But... after corresponding with Ingo Kober, who has many more years experience with tokays, and who has made many points that make a lot of sense, I've done some revisions to several pages.
The reason my tokays aren't fighting is because they don't have enough room to form territories. When I gave them more room they fought, which meant I gave them enough room to be more animated, but not enough to set up their own spaces. Ingo keeps a trio in a 350 gallon sized enclosure, with live potted plants and cork bark. He incorporated a styrofoam backwall covered with concrete in this cage (a friend of mine also made an enclosure like this), which is something I'd like to try.
So, basically give your tokays as much room as you can. Ingo suggested a 60 gallon tank for one tokay. Use common sense and keep an eye on the tokays in whatever enclosure you have them in for signs of fighting and/or stress. In that case you may have to do some separating.
As a general rule, don't house males together in the same enclosure.
Here's a story about a couple of Gekko vittatus I once had...These geckos are related to tokays. I had two males that I was able to house in an 18 gallon tank together. At the time I wasn't able to tell they were males. That happened much later. Anyway, one time after cleaning their cage, I forgot to close the screen top and they got out. I looked around the room and found them in the open closet. They were both clamped to each other and appeared to have been fighting for sometime. It's like all that extra room made them extra territorial. From then on I kept them in separate tanks, just to be safe.