Meet my little one-eyed monster

Eye of Fry

First, this is the eye of my male juvenile bearded dragon, Fry. He's about 4 months old and I've raised him from the time he was an egg. He's at the end of a skin shedding cycle and you can see down at the bottom of the photo where dead scales overlap fresh ones.

You also get a great view of the very fine scales that bearded dragons have instead of eyelashes and the individual veins in his eye. Other than being about to cast off a layer of eyelid skin this is a perfectly healthy dragon eye.

Eye of Leela

This is the right eye of Fry's sister, Leela. It seems that Leela developed a birth defect during incubation that caused this eye and the surrounding part of her skull to fail to develop fully. When she was first born we thought she was born without a right eye entirely. It was only after she grew a little bit that the eye was at all visible, and it still just looks like a black pinhole without the assistance of magnification.

You can see that this much smaller than normal eye is milky colored and the iris doesn't properly align with the eyelid. She does not seem to be able to see out of this eye at all, but she can still open and close the tiny eye lid.

When she was first born she was also very underweight and had to be isolated from her clutch-mates due to concerns about injury and her inability to compete for food. Despite this, after a rough first two months of life she suddenly hit a growth spurt and she's got the best appetite and eating behavior of any reptile I've ever had. I just need to hold food up to her good side and she will snap it up with well-practiced accuracy.

Leela's Good Side

If she can be said to have a good side, that is. To be honest, my cute little girl is kind of a jerk. I can't blame her though, she was so tiny when she was young that it was hard to handle her at all, and she was so jumpy it was hard to hold on to her without hurting her. As a result, even basic care was difficult with her and when she did start to grow she quickly learned to bite fingers and the soft webbing between them when she didn't want the giants touching her. Once she was big and sturdy enough to handle properly I started really working on taming her and she hasn't bit me in over two weeks.

She's a mutant, and the craziest dragon I've ever met, but I love this little cyclops. She needed a little extra care, but it's totally worth it to be able to show off pictures of my healthy 10-inch one-eyed monster.

Hatchling Tax

Thanks for reading my little post. If you have the time and inclination to read more bearded dragon stories please visit my post at http://imgur.com/gallery/FrL4D (part 2 is on the way soon!)