Hello, my beardie, Anubis, is 21 months old and I was wondering if anyone knew a way to get him to return to eating live food?
When he was little, he loved hunting and catching crickets-theyre his favorite food. He's never had an issue eating his salad and he's always been willing to eat freeze-dried insects as well. I had to go out of country for about six months and so he stayed at a family members house. I returned recently and said family member informed me that they took advantage of the fact he doesn't mind non-live food to feed him a purely freeze dried and greens diet, so that they didn't have to bother with keeping live insects. However, now that he's back with me, I want him to return to his usual diet, which is the salad, live insects and occasionally the freeze dried, and so I ordered him crickets which came in a couple days ago. I let the crickets calm down and begin their gut load program, but this morning when I placed Anubis into the feeding tank (he's continued to eat there with the freeze dried so he's not just being reintroduced) he panicked. He wouldn't even look at the insects, instead getting as far from them as he could and scratching at the glass in an attempt to escape.
So my question is how do I get him to go back to eating live food? Is it impossible now that he's been off of it so long? Any ideas or tips? Thank you!
At that age I'd keep him mostly on nice salads with plenty of variety. I only offer my adult a bug meal once or sometimes twice a week with an occasional hornworm or silkworm snack thrown his way. If you can get Anubis to dig into a nice variety of salad, that should be a very good diet in general. Only offering bugs occasionally may have him just hungry enough to attack a few now and then. They certainly don't eat with as much gusto as they do when they're young and growing quickly. If his weight is remaining pretty stable then he should be in good shape.
i know you can try to hand feed the dragon. maybe he will see it and try to eat it. have you tried roaches? these guys are the best and live longer then crickets, maybe he would like something like that.
i don't know if i should suggest this.. but you can try super worms, and see if he would at least eat one of them.
my beardie doesn't like to touch his veggies, and there those pre made freeze dried salad. all dragons are weird in there own way