Crickets and calcium supplementation

[dpjm]

Hi everyone. When it comes to dusting crickets or other insects, the common advice given is to lightly dust the crickets, so they are greyish in color. I don't know where this advice originally came from, but everyone seems to buy into that idea.

The truth is that insects are severely deficient in calcium in terms of what a reptile needs. If the source I checked is accurate, 100 g of banded crickets have 0.035 g of calcium and 0.43 g of phosphorus, which gives a very low calcium phosphorus ratio of 0.06 : 1 if you convert grams to ions. Compared to the recommended 2 : 1 ratio, this is clearly very low and calcium supplementation becomes necessary.

But how much calcium is enough to bring the ratio to 2 : 1?
To get to 2:1, 1 g of banded crickets needs 0.0266 g of calcium carbonate.

So is a light dusting enough?
Turns out no, not even close. I took 10 g of crickets and added 0.26 (or so) g of calcium carbonate. After shaking in a container, the crickets were very white, not at all what you would call lightly dusted. There was a small amount left over that did not stick, probably the crickets were "filled" to capacity.

So my recommendation is to not lightly dust, but heavily dust your crickets with calcium supplement, every time you feed them out.

 

[Walter1]

Hi everyone. When it comes to dusting crickets or other insects, the common advice given is to lightly dust the crickets, so they are greyish in color. I don't know where this advice originally came from, but everyone seems to buy into that idea.

The truth is that insects are severely deficient in calcium in terms of what a reptile needs. If the source I checked is accurate, 100 g of banded crickets have 0.035 g of calcium and 0.43 g of phosphorus, which gives a very low calcium phosphorus ratio of 0.06 : 1 if you convert grams to ions. Compared to the recommended 2 : 1 ratio, this is clearly very low and calcium supplementation becomes necessary.

But how much calcium is enough to bring the ratio to 2 : 1?
To get to 2:1, 1 g of banded crickets needs 0.0266 g of calcium carbonate.

So is a light dusting enough?
Turns out no, not even close. I took 10 g of crickets and added 0.26 (or so) g of calcium carbonate. After shaking in a container, the crickets were very white, not at all what you would call lightly dusted. There was a small amount left over that did not stick, probably the crickets were "filled" to capacity.

So my recommendation is to not lightly dust, but heavily dust your crickets with calcium supplement, every time you feed them out.

Well, thanks. Useful info. I and others on this site thankfully suggest dusting at every feeding, especially during thecfirst 1.5-2.0 years of life. No one here has said, that I can find, lightly.

 

[Roadkill]

Walter1, while I would agree that it likely has never specifically been said "lightly", this is often how "dusting" is interpreted. The part of dpjm's post that I think will get overlooked is that to even get the proper ratio you have to do it to excess, and that dpjm is only addressing the ratio, he's not even touching on whether this is a sufficient amount. I would add to this, I've tried saying in numerous older posts, that it gets worse when people try to do the raw meat based diet. They still use the "dusting" idea, but when I've looked at the content of whole prey, and tried to replicate the calcium/phosphorus CONTENT that one would get from an equally massed whole prey vertebrate, the amount one has to add in basically highly changes the entire texture of the meat. "Dusting" is a terrible adjective to be using when for about a pound of meat you need to be adding cups of supplement. Add to this the foolish trend of people trying to get their tegus as big as possible as fast as possible (ie. typically a diet extremely rich in protein, extremely deficient in calcium) and it's a recipe for guaranteed skeletal pathologies.

 

[Walter1]

Walter1, while I would agree that it likely has never specifically been said "lightly", this is often how "dusting" is interpreted. The part of dpjm's post that I think will get overlooked is that to even get the proper ratio you have to do it to excess, and that dpjm is only addressing the ratio, he's not even touching on whether this is a sufficient amount. I would add to this, I've tried saying in numerous older posts, that it gets worse when people try to do the raw meat based diet. They still use the "dusting" idea, but when I've looked at the content of whole prey, and tried to replicate the calcium/phosphorus CONTENT that one would get from an equally massed whole prey vertebrate, the amount one has to add in basically highly changes the entire texture of the meat. "Dusting" is a terrible adjective to be using when for about a pound of meat you need to be adding cups of supplement. Add to this the foolish trend of people trying to get their tegus as big as possible as fast as possible (ie. typically a diet extremely rich in protein, extremely deficient in calcium) and it's a recipe for guaranteed skeletal pathologies.

No disagreement. Re. 'dusting', I season heavily.

All of these things make sense as a reflection of what the animal idapted for in the wild.

 

[dpjm]

.

The part of dpjm's post that I think will get overlooked is that to even get the proper ratio you have to do it to excess, and that dpjm is only addressing the ratio, he's not even touching on whether this is a sufficient amount

Absolutely correct. Just because you've achieved a 2:1 ratio doesn't mean there is enough calcium, it just means there is enough relative to phosphorus. I am working out that second question now and I will certainly post what I find.

 

[dpjm]

This is something I did for work, so I thought I'd share it on here. It may interest you or may not. If you feed a lot of insects, you might check it out.

The recommended amount of calcium that an omnivorous reptile should have is 1.0 - 1.5 % of the total diet by dry matter (weight of everything minus water content). That's from the Merck Veterinary Manual.
http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/m...ic_and_zoo_animals/nutrition_in_reptiles.html

So now we have two calcium related requirements,
1) in relation to phosphorus (2:1 ratio)
2) a total amount (1.0-1.5 % of diet DM).

So the question is, if we get these crickets to a 2:1 ratio using a calcium supplement to offset the phosphorus and satisfy requirement 1, what percentage of the diet is that amount of calcium? Or in other words, can we satisfy both requirements at the same time?

For any given amount of crickets when calcium is at a 2:1 ratio with phosphorus, the calcium is around 4% of the total diet. So that ends up being a bit high, actually over double what is recommended in Merck. So you cannot satisfy both requirements using crickets alone, they would have to be paired with other foods that have a lower calcium percentage than 1.0-1.5%. Fortunately that is pretty much what everyone does, but it just shows that a diet of crickets alone would not be suitable.

What about other feeder inverts?

superworms:
Ca is 2% when at 2:1. Better. The only thing is you'll never get enough calcium to stick to them to get to 2:1. Superworms should be paired with something that is higher in calcium than 1.0-1.5% I haven't actually checked how much calcium carbonate will stick to them like I have with crickets but it never seems like much.

dubia roaches:
Ca is 0.54% when at 2:1. Low, but you could add more calcium carbonate to get it to 1.0-1.5%. But then you've upset the 2:1 ratio in favor of calcium. This can again be overcome by pairing with other foods, these would be neutral in calcium amount and higher in phosphorus than calcium.

hissing roaches:
Ca is 0.38 when at 2:1. A bit lower than dubias but same fix.

(The reason that the roaches are much lower than crickets and superworms in calcium content at 2:1 is because they are both much lower in phosphorus and so require less calcium carbonate to bring them to 2:1. They are naturally comparable to crickets and kingworms in calcium content.)

This would be more important to us if tegus were strict insectivores, fortunately we have loads of food options.

 

[Walter1]

This is something I did for work, so I thought I'd share it on here. It may interest you or may not. If you feed a lot of insects, you might check it out.

The recommended amount of calcium that an omnivorous reptile should have is 1.0 - 1.5 % of the total diet by dry matter (weight of everything minus water content). That's from the Merck Veterinary Manual.
http://www.merckvetmanual.com/mvm/m...ic_and_zoo_animals/nutrition_in_reptiles.html

So now we have two calcium related requirements,
1) in relation to phosphorus (2:1 ratio)
2) a total amount (1.0-1.5 % of diet DM).

So the question is, if we get these crickets to a 2:1 ratio using a calcium supplement to offset the phosphorus and satisfy requirement 1, what percentage of the diet is that amount of calcium? Or in other words, can we satisfy both requirements at the same time?

For any given amount of crickets when calcium is at a 2:1 ratio with phosphorus, the calcium is around 4% of the total diet. So that ends up being a bit high, actually over double what is recommended in Merck. So you cannot satisfy both requirements using crickets alone, they would have to be paired with other foods that have a lower calcium percentage than 1.0-1.5%. Fortunately that is pretty much what everyone does, but it just shows that a diet of crickets alone would not be suitable.

What about other feeder inverts?

superworms:
Ca is 2% when at 2:1. Better. The only thing is you'll never get enough calcium to stick to them to get to 2:1. Superworms should be paired with something that is higher in calcium than 1.0-1.5% I haven't actually checked how much calcium carbonate will stick to them like I have with crickets but it never seems like much.

dubia roaches:
Ca is 0.54% when at 2:1. Low, but you could add more calcium carbonate to get it to 1.0-1.5%. But then you've upset the 2:1 ratio in favor of calcium. This can again be overcome by pairing with other foods, these would be neutral in calcium amount and higher in phosphorus than calcium.

hissing roaches:
Ca is 0.38 when at 2:1. A bit lower than dubias but same fix.

(The reason that the roaches are much lower than crickets and superworms in calcium content at 2:1 is because they are both much lower in phosphorus and so require less calcium carbonate to bring them to 2:1. They are naturally comparable to crickets and kingworms in calcium content.)

This would be more important to us if tegus were strict insectivores, fortunately we have loads of food options.

Thank you very much for this. I swear, enough good info in care to staple a bunch of posts forca guide to successful tegu care.