Beardie becoming somewhat spoiled/picky

[mommacude]

Hi there! I have a juvenile beardie. We got him as a baby at Christmas. He's 16" nose to tail and 9.9 oz tiday.

I've been mostly feeding him Dubia roaches and greens but decided to give him some variety. So, I got Phoenix worms, super worms, and hornworms. He absolutely loves the hornworms and even looks up across the room for them. I've started hiding the container. :lol:

I'm not planning to make that his primary food due to cost but I've given in since he really wants them and have given him one or two with almost every meal.

Phoenix worms thrown on here and there and one or two superworms once or twice a day.

He is starting to lose interest in his Dubia now though! I'm working on establishing my colony and so I'd love it if that could be his main protein along with superworms which I'm starting to try and raise also.

Here's the thing. If I go into my colony and get a newly adult male, where it's still soft and white or still not hard, I'll give him that. He gobbles that down but I don't want to feed to many off my colony yet. At this point I'm just getting my ratio of male, female right. I have a small bin of medium sized ones I bought just for feeding him.

So he'll eat the hornworms, he'll usually eat the super worms. He gobbles up the hornworms, but now is mostly ignoring the medium Dubia.

What can I do to get him more interested again? He's actually my son's dragon but I care for him more. I'm afraid I've messed up and spoiled him with those juicy blue fat hornworms.

Thanks in advance.

 

[CooperDragon]

The hornworms are good as a treat but they have a pretty high water content so I wouldn't give too many of them. Definitely not as a staple. The supers are OK too as a treat but they are a bit high in fat so best added to a varied diet as a treat too. The Phoenix worms are good as a staple but are quite small so it's tough to offer them as a staple to a larger dragon. Perhaps you could get an order of medium dubias to keep as feeders while your colony grows. It's best to let your colony get established and not pick at it too much for a while if you can avoid it. I'd just offer dubias for a while to get him interested again. If he starts to get hungry he'll dig into them. They are a good staple bug but once he's back into them you can start offering the worms now and then as well. It's good to offer variety in his diet.

 

[mommacude]

Thanks. I found in an old thread that someone was having this problem, and they put calcium on the dubias thinking it was the white color they liked. Well, that worked!! And, come to think of it, I only recently stopped dusting my dubias because I was told once they start eating their greens really well you can just dust the greens. So, it could be that he was used to them having white on them, which explains why he liked the white ones. I was only giving those because I didn't want too much hard shell in his tummy.

I already ordered some mediums that I have in a feeding bin and that's what my plan was, but he wasn't eating them so I was getting a bit concerned.

Anyway hopefully we're back to normal. Once I use up these hornworms I'll probably just order one more pack to have on hand for a treat every couple days. I ordered two containers of them and they started eating each other. such a waste! And I wasn't sure if one that had been chewed on was OK to feed him once it fell to the bottom of the cup. One I gave him clearly had just been injured, but I couldn't be 100% sure it wasn't sick from some other problem.

This forum is so great; thanks!

 

[CooperDragon]

That's an easy fix then =). I'd keep dusting the bugs rather than the salad. The supplement is designed to make up in mineral deficiencies of the bugs while a well balanced salad is likely to be quite nutritious on it's own.

 

[mommacude]

That's an easy fix then =). I'd keep dusting the bugs rather than the salad. The supplement is designed to make up in mineral deficiencies of the bugs while a well balanced salad is likely to be quite nutritious on it's own.

Yes, the person giving the advice just stated that she thought it was an easier way to get the calcium into her beardies. But I'm glad it was an easy fix. The only think is that when he doesn't eat them I end up with powdered dubias running around; guess it doesn't seem to bother them too much. I just put them back in the feeder bin.

 

[Bmiller]

I've only had my juvenile beardie for two weeks and can already see the peril of becoming a picky eater. I made the mistake of feeding him superworms while he was sitting on my desk and now he prowls my desk relentlessly stopping to fix me with that sideways look of "More wormz pleaz?". The next day he ignored crickets entirely until about noon which was a radical break from his normal wake up, chow down, "make more room" under the heat lamp sending me running for paper towel, chow down again.

And I had to laugh about the warning sign of "unusually pungent" elimination. This little stinker can clear a room already and look quite satisfied with himself when doing so :shock:

Oh and spot on with the calcium powder. Don't know if it's associative or they actually like the taste but it was the key for me to get him to eat some greens and reptile pellets for variety.

 

[mommacude]

I've only had my juvenile beardie for two weeks and can already see the peril of becoming a picky eater. I made the mistake of feeding him superworms while he was sitting on my desk and now he prowls my desk relentlessly stopping to fix me with that sideways look of "More wormz pleaz?". The next day he ignored crickets entirely until about noon which was a radical break from his normal wake up, chow down, "make more room" under the heat lamp sending me running for paper towel, chow down again.

And I had to laugh about the warning sign of "unusually pungent" elimination. This little stinker can clear a room already and look quite satisfied with himself when doing so :shock:

Oh and spot on with the calcium powder. Don't know if it's associative or they actually like the taste but it was the key for me to get him to eat some greens and reptile pellets for variety.

That's adorable. "more wormz pleez" lol

Zeus is now around 7 months old and his appetite has greatly decreased. He eats his salad but isn't chowing down on his proteins nearly as much as he was. I guess that's normal as they get closer to adulthood. I worry about him but he's still active and has plenty of padding. . .I just loved watching him chow down on the dubias one after the other after the other. The last couple days I'm trying to use up the hornworms I have because they're getting huge, so he only eats one or two of them.