cfjustin":32ht1y5s said:
Im glad he got the solid form of his poop back, thats great. So, hornworms couldve been bad chow, which upon further research never really spoils. Id estimate the chow was atleast 2 weeks old. The chow we use is preserved until all of it is digested which in turn is a full cycle of life/growth. I personally believe it was too much moisture and
hydration at once. Hornworms are around %85 moisture. The moisture make his feces wet and loose.
I don't think it was the fact that I fed him hornworms, because I feed those to him daily, 1-2 per day. He did not get diaharia till feeding him these actual hornworms that had rancid smelling chow. These particular hornworms also had dry, infrequent, and blackish fras balls. I've gotten one other batch of hornworms before that were identical to what happened with this batch. He happened to get diaharia in the same week as we got the rancid smelling chow.
I've been doing some reading about the chow, and although the chow itself does not spoil per se, I've read that sometimes the chow can get bacteria growth on it and will make it smell badly, and can, in turn, make the hornworms not eat it as often, or when they do, they ingest bad bacteria, causing the blackish fras balls, and it makes sense that they would stop eating, which is why there were two non growing hornworms left. That all makes perfect sense.
This particular container of hornworms was having hornworms taken out as people purchased particular amounts, and I got the container after mixing in more to make a total of 12. It's very possible that in fishing through them with fingers, the wrong kind of bacteria got into the chow..maybe the person placing the hornworms into this container had a small amount of lizard poop on their fingers prior to grabbing new hornworms and placing them in there to make the total of 12..who knows? That too, makes sense, especially if someone grows comfortable with working in a shop and forgets to wash thoroughly after handling a lizard for customers, or cleaning out a viv, etc. It would be easy to contaminate a feeder container that way.