The Right Way to Serve Lunch

Most hobbyists, after swirling insects in ajar with vitamin/ mineral mix, simply dump crickets, mealworms, etc., onto the floor of the vivarium. However, if you have only a few lizards and you put in too many insects at one time, the uneaten ones will scurry about the tank, losing their vitamin/mineral coating. When you offer more insects than -are needed at a single feeding, the excess crickets hide; mealworms burrow in the substrate. Later, your hungry lizard eats these escapee insects, probably nutrient depleted and without the vitamin/mineral coating.

The author has heard many stories of hobbyists who swear that they methodically vitamin/mineral coated their insects when feeding baby lizards and "they developed rickets anyway." The cause is invariably the wrong calcium/phosphorus ratio or inadequate amounts of vitamin D3 or (quite often) inappropriate feeding methods that allowed the introduced insects to lose their vitamin/mineral coating.

When feeding insects to lizards, the first rule is: Don't offer them more than they will eat at one feeding. After a period of time, the appropriate number of insects to be fed at each feeding can easily be determined. Some people with large collections have a very methodical way of feeding in such a way that each vivarium gets a specific number of insects at each feeding.

The second rule is: Introduce coated insects in a feeding dish. The challenge is finding the right kind of dish. Unfortunately, no dishes sold in the pet trade, including the standard plastic watering dishes, are designed for feeding insects to reptiles. To find the right dish will require a trip to an imported goods or department store in search of small porcelain or glass dishes. For smalllizards, import stores often sell small sauce dishes that work quite well. Finding the right dish is not easy. It should to be high enough to prevent the insects from crawling out, and yet not so high that, after you sink the dish in the ground medium of the tank, the lizards can't see the contents. Note: Crickets without hind legs and pinched mealworms will usually not be able to easily escape from smooth glass- or porcelain-sided dishes.