Not everyone has heard all of these, but I have come across every one of them working with crested geckos.
Video · 17 min watchWritten by Brian
The third part of my series on common crested gecko beliefs that are not accurate.
1. Your crested gecko loves you and likes to be handled
Crested geckos do not need companionship or enjoy being touched. They tolerate handling very well, which is one reason they make good pets, but over-handling can be dangerous. A few minutes out each day is fine, and they can learn to link it with feeding. Taking your gecko to the mall, or keeping it on the couch for a two-and-a-half-hour movie, is too much.
2. Crested geckos can live with other species
Never house a crested gecko with a different species. Frogs are the most common suggestion: many have toxins in their skin, and if a frog soaks in the water dish your gecko drinks those toxins, which can make it sick or kill it. Care and temperatures generally differ, and even other New Caledonian species such as gargoyle geckos can bring aggression problems.
3. Below 18 °C (65 °F) your gecko will die
Crested geckos do best at about room temperature, 21–24 °C (70–76 °F), but they can survive the low 50s °F (about 10–12 °C) and lower. Do not keep them there, but if your heating fails in winter, they handle cold better than heat. A customer's gecko from another breeder once arrived after a cold delay, on its side and apparently dead. After a couple of hours warming up it was fine. Long-term effects are possible, but they are hardy.
4. Anything over 27 °C (80 °F) will instantly kill your gecko
They can handle brief spells into the high 80s °F (around 30 °C) as long as temperatures come back down. If your air conditioning fails, a room at 30 °C (86 °F) does not mean your gecko is that hot: it can bury itself in the substrate, which is usually a few degrees cooler. You can also spray the enclosure and run a light fan over it to carry heat away, much like sweat.
5. They can handle the low 90s °F because New Caledonia gets that hot
A wild gecko on a 33 °C (92 °F) day is not on a branch in the sun. It is under leaf litter, in moist soil or in a hollow log. A captive gecko in a small enclosure has none of those options, so copying the wild climate is not proper care.
6. Females with floppy tail syndrome cannot breed
Floppy tail syndrome is when the muscles at the base of the tail cannot hold it up, so it flops over the head when the gecko hangs upside down, or the pelvis shows a kink. The claim is that affected females are more likely to become egg bound. When I made this video I had been breeding for 12 years, had hatched tens of thousands of offspring and had kept hundreds of breeding females with floppy tail. Not one became egg bound.
7. Incubation temperature decides the sex of hatchlings
True for many reptiles, but not crested geckos. At 20–21 °C (68–70 °F) or 24–26 °C (76–78 °F) you get roughly 50/50 males and females. There is evidence it matters in leachianus and chahoua geckos. I usually incubate at 21–22 °C (70–72 °F).