Roach Chow - Yes or No?

[nocontextlizard]

Hello all,

I just ordered some water crystals for my dubia roaches and it came with this roach chow. Do you think it is healthy to feed them or I should just stick with fruits and veggies? Thanks!

 

[KarrieRee]

Hello all,

I just ordered some water crystals for my dubia roaches and it came with this roach chow. Do you think it is healthy to feed them or I should just stick with fruits and veggies? Thanks!

I feed that and fresh veggies or roach food --- not sure what the difference is between the chow and the food

 

[xp29]

Does it tell the percentages? If it is high protein i wouldn't give it to roaches i planned to feed. If it doesn't tell the percentages i just wouldn't use it. Giving high protein food to roaches your going to feed can contribute to gout. They convert it to uric acid and store it the way mammals do fat. You literally have to starve it back out of them to lower the ua levels. It's much safer to just feed them the leftover greens.

 

[JohnLillywhite23]

Something I've always done is feed your feeders what you want your beardie to eat. I am strictly on fruits and veggies for my feeders, and oranges for my breeders.

 

[CooperDragon]

As mentioned, I'd be wary of the dog food ingredient in particular. I just feed my roaches scraps like leftover dragon salads and veges from the kitchen like carrots and squash along with occasional oats or bread slices. The colony has been thriving for a decade on that.

 

[ChileanTaco]

I feed organic oatmeal and veggies.
The veggies I'm using are just scraps (raw), so there is no extra need to buy something. Carrot ends, the inner part of a pumpkin, the outer leaf of a kale on which already some insects ate, an apple or pear core...

Also, in the insect bowl in the enclosure always I put some veggies, too. For two reasons:
- despite the bowl I use is escape-proof, one cannot always rule out any escaping insects, but food in there will keep them in
- the insects continue to eat, so are continued to "gut-load" during the day.
My dragon usually won't eat right away when I put food in. And I leave the house early in the morning. So the insects might be in the bowl for 6 - 8 hours until my dragon eats them.

Some veggies in the bowl will also keep the insects alive and active for days, e.g. when I know I'll be away for some days, I put two bowls of insects and a lot of thick carrot slices in there, too. (Works fine as my dragon doesn't tend to overeating. Usually there are plenty of insects left when I come back home, even after days.)

 

[ChileanTaco]

As mentioned, I'd be wary of the dog food ingredient in particular. I just feed my roaches scraps like leftover dragon salads and veges from the kitchen like carrots and squash along with occasional oats or bread slices. The colony has been thriving for a decade on that.

Exactly that. We have plenty of raw kitchen scraps (as we cook daily and are vegetarians ) and what my dragon won't finish also goes into the feeder bins.

For all pets I have and had, I want to restrain from "ready-made dry food" as far as possible.
For the fish I have to use it, but I'm not using it for the feeder insects (and I doubt I could even get it here), I'm not using it for my hissing cockroaches (which are pets, not feeders), I'm not using it for my dragon (I would only use such as "critical care" in an emergency), and I wasn't using it for my land hermit crabs (fed them with veggies, fruits, egg shells and fish; no pellets). All of them are (or in the case of the crabs, were) thriving.
I have seen that some people consider feeding veggies as "complicated" (saw this when I had to rehome my land hermit crabs - so many people wanted them to eat pellets), but as we always buy them for us, technically it's just scraps that would go into the waste bin otherwise. And for the dragon the veggies are a must nevertheless.

The bread slices:
We once did this. Once... It was a mess.
What happened: My husband put a piece of dry stale dark rye bred (German farmer's style bread, homemade, quite heavily salted) into a box of superworms. I was away. According to the usual schedule, I told him to clean out the superworms once every four days. That schedule has worked well so far. But the bread.... It was drawing a lot of moisture, likely because of the salt, and it was extremely nasty and some 20 superworms have died, some 10 in the week after. I wasn't there and my husband had to clean that up, he said he was almost vomiting (I believe him).
From then on, our rule is: no bread.
Other fail was flour. Also mistake by my husband. In German a "mealworm" is literally a "flour worm". So he put in some flour... actually what is left on the baking sheet when making bread. This however clogs the trachea of insects. Didn't look that nasty as with the bread, but a lot of mealworms died.