Feeding Question

[Dirkthejerk41]

I was curious if it is absolutely necessary for a juvenile tegu to have insects as a part of their diet?? My colombian tegu currently eats well on ground turkey, pinkie mice, and scrambled eggs, and tuna in water, all with calcium. He has eaten crickets before but I really get tired of hearing the leftover crickets that he didn't get to chirping all night. He will not eat meal worms. Is it okay to just keep him on the tuna, turkey, eggs, and mice?

 

[Tannaros]

I was curious if it is absolutely necessary for a juvenile tegu to have insects as a part of their diet?? My colombian tegu currently eats well on ground turkey, pinkie mice, and scrambled eggs, and tuna in water, all with calcium. He has eaten crickets before but I really get tired of hearing the leftover crickets that he didn't get to chirping all night. He will not eat meal worms. Is it okay to just keep him on the tuna, turkey, eggs, and mice?

I don't believe it's absolutely necessary for them to have invertebrates as part of their diet. However, it certainly could be beneficial to give them a variety, especially when young - if for nothing else, so they accept more items when they're older. Generally speaking of course.

I personally detest crickets for a number of reasons. Though I have found that I do enjoy raising Blaptica dubia as a food source for essentially any of my pets that will readily eat them. They don't do much climbing, or escaping for that matter, they have near to no odor, they have a much better longevity...they don't randomly cannibalize one another...and they're easy to keep.

Just my two cents.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

Only problem is... I have a bit of a cockroach phobia

 

[Tannaros]

Only problem is... I have a bit of a cockroach phobia

I personally think dubias look very different from their all too familiar cousins. You can't really tell that they even are roaches looking down at them. Really more just like spotted ovals moving about.

However, I can respect if it just irks you regardless.

Perhaps try some sort of beetle larvae? Superworms, horn worms, silk worms, etc.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

yeah i got you. I think i may just keep him on turkey, eggs, tuna, and mice for now. we'll see

 

[Skeetzy]

I hate bugs, and spiders. I refuse to touch crickets. I hate digging my hands through dirt because of creepy crawlers.

BUT, dubia are really not bad. Get a box of vinyl disposable gloves and it makes handling them way easier. I kept a colony for over a year. Didn't touch one of them until my friend who mass breeds them, offered me 25 adult females to hold one and take a picture. The biggest fear is that first time holding them.

Stay away from males. They're very quick and super antsy. Females will usually just chill on your hand. I used to close my hand around them for a few seconds and they'd calm down quickly.

Good luck!

 

[chelvis]

Ditch the tuna, not great for humans and not good for reptiles. Try things like gizzards, chicken necks, fruits, for fish talapia is a good one that isn't harmful like tuna.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

can you get it cheap? Or maybe canned like tuna?

 

[chelvis]

Talapia is dirt cheap. It sell for $1.99lb in many supper markets, frozen fillets are easy to come by, not really sold in cans though. You have to remember that tuna for humans should be in limited quantity due to the mercury content.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

okay sweet, ill get some talapia for him!

 

[E_M]

I also have a bug phobia.. Those freakin crickets could honestly make me cry! My worst fear is that one of those little disgusting things will jump on me. I don't like them at all.. The dubias however I've grown used to. I don't like to have the big ones on me, i don't handle them with my bare hands and I don't find that necessary either. The little ones are fine though. But besides from that, they're pretty cool to keep, and rewarding I now have 1500 of them and my colony grows each day. I'd say give them o shot! They don't climb glass, they don't fly, bite or hiss and they're a great food source for various reptiles.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

hmmmm maybe..... lol we'll see if i can handle it. Also, what are ya'lls thoughts on feeding in a seperate bin?

 

[chelvis]

For some people its the only way to feed, for others they see it as a waste of time. Personally I go back and forth, sometimes I feed in a bin sometimes with a bowl. I know people worry about impaction with feeding in the enclosure, especially with wetter foods like ground meat. If you are going to feed in a separate bin start young, as with almost everything else with tegus its easier to get them use to eating from a bin at a younger age and they are less likely to fight it when they are older.

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

I tried it once, and he flipped out in the bin. He has eaten in the bathroom a couple of times, but usually i just put the bowl in the tank, as this is a sure fire way for him to eat.

 

[Raicardoso]

I also have a bug phobia.. Those freakin crickets could honestly make me cry! My worst fear is that one of those little disgusting things will jump on me. I don't like them at all.. The dubias however I've grown used to. I don't like to have the big ones on me, i don't handle them with my bare hands and I don't find that necessary either. The little ones are fine though. But besides from that, they're pretty cool to keep, and rewarding I now have 1500 of them and my colony grows each day. I'd say give them o shot! They don't climb glass, they don't fly, bite or hiss and they're a great food source for various reptiles.

I don't know how you can be scared of crickets but not dubias :O

 

[E_M]

I don't know how you can be scared of crickets but not dubias :O

Crickets jump! They're fast and unreliable! Crickets look at me like they're waiting for the right moment to jump on me just to scar me for live! The dubia roaches are pretty easy going and they don't jump. But like I said, I didn't like them at first but I've grown used to them. The crickets not so much... :-/

 

[Alxsparks]

I can count on one hand the number of times Finnegan has eaten crickets. He's gotten by pretty well on ground meats and mice for the 9 months I've had him, and the vet says he's doing great.

As for feeding location, we keep all of our reptiles on paper towels (not the most natural looking environment, but we've read/heard a lot or recommendations for it and it's been working well for us), so substrates are not an issue. There was a time when we took him out every day to feed him to make sure he was getting all the handling he needed, but once he got too big for the rubbermaid tub we were feeding in we just started putting the food in the cage before we left for work in the morning. And now that he doesn't hide from us anymore there's definitely not a lack of handling happening.

 

[HeatherN]

i hate crickets personally. they eat anything they can chew on (including your tegu), chirp incessantly, and have bit me so hard theyve actually drawn blood a couple times. lately, i have to keep them for my fence lizards, but at least the guy i get them from never gives me fully mature ones. though now i have them running all over my apartment...

as for the dubias, i was kinda in the same boat. i wasnt afraid of roaches, but i seriously detested them. i have a sensitive nose, and i could smell if there were roaches around. they smelled terrible to say the least. then one day, i saw dubia at an expo, and i had heard all the good stuff about them. i had never seen them in person, so when i looked at them i was rather surprised. they looked like little hisser roaches. theyre tropical roaches, which are much more tolerable, docile, slow, and clean than their more temperate cousins (the kind that infest many homes). i bought a little box of them to try for Tarot, my tegu, and the rest is history. Now i have a huge colony in a rubber made bin i keep under my bed with some eggcrate and old veges thrown in once and awhile. people never notice theyre even there until i pull it out and open it up. most are freaked out by how they had no clue how i could keep that many roaches in such close proximity to them and have them never notice!

regardless, i could suggest dubias simply because my animals go nuts for them. they have a higher meat to shell ratio than most other feeders, they move enough to get most reptiles interested, they have phenomenal nutritional value, easy to gutload (theyll eat anything), and they seem to taste good to my pets! my bearded dragons go absolutely insane when they see me pull out the bin, and all my frogs perk up when i bring them around. even my quail like them!

As for feeding in a separate bin, i think it's mostly personal preference. unless your guy likes to coat his food in his substrate. for some, it can be a solution to food-related cage aggression. for others, it helps keep the cage cleaner and prevent impaction. personally, i never have a problem with either, but each tegu and their situation is different. i tried feeding tarot in a bin when he was littler, but the whole process of removing him and putting him in a bin scared the living daylights out of him. he ended up only eating when he was perched on my chest and fed meat scraps with a pair of tongs. obviously, thats not very practical and he got too big, so i soon switched him over to being fed in his cage. i still used tongs, and to this day he gets super excited when he sees the tongs come out. sometimes he will just chew on the tip if theres nothing on it! using tongs also eliminated the problem of substrate getting on his meat, and allowed him to see that i wasnt going to eat him if he came out of his hide.

now that he eats sooooo much, tong feeding isnt too practical anymore when I've got other things to do, and often he'll lose interest because he wants to come out when i open his cage instead of eat. so nowadays i use a ceramic bowl with low edges to put his food in. i have a basking platform with no substrate on it, so i'll often put it there to avoid getting dirt on his food, but sometimes its unavoidable. for example, he has to fling his nightcrawlers everywhere before he finally decides to eat them. he hasnt seem to had any problems with eating small amounts of dirt. perhaps it is due to all the water he drinks out of my dog's bowl. it goes right through him!

but i digress. my points were that i would recommend trying out some dubias instead of crickets and that feeding is ultimately a combo of what works for you and what works for your 'gu.

sorry for the long post!

 

[Dirkthejerk41]

lol thank you. We will see. I probably wouldn't start a colony unless I had more lizards... but I'm thinking I may want a bearded dragon one day, so we'll see then