Herpetocultural Cuisine: Four Steps Toward the Right Way to Feed Insect-eating Lizards

1. Food Selection

This is an important consideration when feeding lizards and one area in which many people lack good judgment.

Size Selection

Errors in size selection of prey are probably the most COmInon in the pet trade. For example, many pet stores selling green anoles (Anolis) sell only one size of cricket (five-week old adults) and standard mealworms. Neither of these food items is the right size for the anoles; they are also inadequate for virtualIy every other smalIlizard soldo Yet when offered to a hungry anole, it usualIy goes after the insect and struggles to swalIow it. The next day it may seem ill and bloated and often regurgitates. Insect-eating lizards are not snakes and they are not monitor lizards. Most have evolved to ea t many small prey items over the course of a day. Y ou may ask, "What difference does it make?" Well, a large prey has a smaller surface relative to its volume when compared with a small prey. This allows a relatively smaller area for digestive juices to work on. In the digestive tract of a smalllizard, a large insect prey item is a big object with a tough exoskeleton. More than likely it was not chewed before it was swallowed. Large prey ingested by an insect-eating lizard may start decomposing before it is digested, and the lizard that has eaten it may become ill and regurgitate the meal.

Another aspect of size selection involves the time it takes prey to pass through the digestive tract. Smaller insects are digested faster and move out of the stomach and through the digestive tract more quickly, thus allowing the lizard to eat again significantly sooner than when it is given large prey. With large insects, sometimes the prey takes up so much room in the stomach of the lizard that even breathing is impaired.

How to gauge the right size insectto feed lizards is learned with experience. As a general rule, the width of the insect should be not more than one third the width of the lizard' s head. The length of the insect should be less than one and one-fourth times the length of the lizard' s head, and the apparent volume of the insect no more than one third the apparent volume of the lizard's head. Imagine it requiring five insects to fill the belly area of the lizard and choose the insect size accordingly.

What about feeding that green anole?

For sub-adults and adults, three-week old crickets are suitable. These same crickets would also be fed to house geckos, many of the smaller day geckos, the smaller Chilean lizards now being imported, as well as baby green water dragons (Physignathus cocincinus).