Sharing ideas on tracking health for adult dragons

As my dragon is closing in on 1 year old and will be a full grown adult soon enough, I was thinking what long term husbandry practices would be good to start tracking and recording now. So much of having a healthy and happy adult dragon relies on them getting the best start to life. There are more articles about that and there are articles about navigating some adult challenges like brumation and egg laying.

I would love to hear what long term dragon keepers do to help keep their dragon healthy and happy. What things to keep a record of for health?

Some ideas I have moving forward are:

- Weekly weight check in grams

- quarterly close up photos of toes, tail, head, and body

- my vet advises yearly fecal sample to check for parasites even if dragon seems healthy, sooner if something is off

- Bulb calendar like alarms on phone or other record keeping for bulb changes

Tracking the diet and food and type consumed is a good idea imo. At least a weekly summary.

All the adults I've raised as pets into old age have all lived off of healthy varied diets with limited feeders 2 or 3 times a week.

I think it's an interesting statistic to track as I've seen some owners who feed adults insects everyday, but you look back and their dragons were only living 3 or 4 years.

I like to keep a thread for my dragons on this forum for reasons like this. It acts as a journal you can look back on and see how things were, or what you did 6 years ago.

-Brandon

Good points by about the adult eating habit. I put in a lot of work so my Devlyn will eat greens, you all know the greens struggle. A weekly summery of greens is a great idea!

For live feeder, Sometimes on other platforms like Reddit I'll see people mention they give their adult dragon as few as 6 live insects per week. Others jump on them claiming it's abuse to offer so few insects. This is why I want to track weight at minimum weekly. To find that balance of how many insect feeders will do. I think it will be its own challenge to still offer a variety of insects, but a limited number per week.

6 is kind of low but I suppose it depends on what they are. I wouldn't call it abuse though, especially if they dragon eats large salads. They simply dont need much protein or fats as older adults imo.

Even the studies that show their diet is 40%~ insects in the wild is flawed for many reasons.
When's the last time you saw a large salad waiting for the dragons in the wild? Simply put there isnt much in the way of greens to eat for them out there. They are opportunistic, they will eat what they can.
Not to mention, they live a lot longer in captivity than in the wild. Diet is most likely one of the reasons. That and medical intervention in relation to parasites.

-Brandon