Posted by Sarah on May 19, 2009
David just left a comment with a very good question, which I edited a bit for clarity.
“My chameleon is a youngster and eats medium crickets.
Now I looked at him just a moment ago and the crickets have been eating just belowe the spikes on his spine.
Can someone help me please as i cannot figure out what to do.
My e-mail is ***deleted to prevent spam*** thanks and help is needed urgently.”
David, the easy answer is don’t leave crickets in the cage with your chameleon if he isn’t going to eat them very soon.
If there are extra crickets running around, there is always the chance that they will get bored and start crawling on or biting your chameleon.
We keep our crickets and other chameleon foods in separate tupperware containters.
Instead of gutloading the batch we are going to feed the next day, we gutload the entire container, and then we can just grab a few when we are ready to feed the chameleons.
Jeff feeds crickets and mealworms from a cricket feeder cup, and he justs dusts them before he feeds them.
He uses tongs to feed Sully roaches one by one (we really don’t want roaches loose in the house), and he takes a sprinkle of whichever mineral powder he is using that day, and dusts it over each roach before he feeds it.
This way we can see exactly how much each reptile eats, we can make sure they eat the supplements before they come off of the food items, and we can make sure that none of the food escapes from the reptile cages, or stays in the cage long enough to harass the reptiles.
When we do use crickets we will occasionally let one loose in Sully (the panther chameleon) or Tiger’s (the leopard gecko) cages so that they can hunt and get a little bit of exercise, but only when we can tell that they are still hungry, and will be pretty likely to hunt the cricket down before the reptiles go to sleep.
I have heard of people who use a bowl full of crickets wrapped in wire so the crickets can’t climb out of the bowl and eat the reptiles, but with that method you still can’t be sure that your pets are getting proper supplementation.
Your chameleon should also be seen by a vet to make sure the bite wounds below his spikes aren’t infected, and to see if he needs any medications to prevent are treat infections.
Good luck, and let me know how your chameleon is doing.
Thank you.
If you have a reptile question let me know about it! If I don’t know the answer I’ll do my best to find it.
You can see David’s original comment at What do you feed your crickets?
Posted by Sarah on April 10, 2008
Just like people get nutrition from the food they eat, reptiles get nutrition from the foods they eat.
Unfortunately, the nutrition the reptiles get is affected by what their prey ate last.
What I’m trying to say is that it’s important to feed your feeders!
If you are feeding your reptiles crickets, what you feed your crickets can have a great impact on your reptile’s nutrition.
Gutloading crickets is the process of feeding crickets nutritious food, so that the nutrition will be passed on to your pets.
This is a lot easier if you feed your crickets after you get them, but if you don’t want to do this talk to your cricket supplier and ask how they are feeding the crickets.
If the foods they are feeding don’t seem nutritious enough for your pet reptile give the crickets some more nutritious food at least 4 hours before you feed the crickets to your reptile. That way the nutrition will be able to be passed along to your pet.
When you are buying crickets look around and make sure that the crickets are kept in clean conditions, without too many dead crickets in the bottom of the cage.
One local store always has flies or mosquitos flying out of their live crickets – we definitely don’t get crickets from them. Gross!
If you do buy crickets in bulk it’s a lot easier to make sure they are properly gutloaded – you already have a place to keep them while you’re gutloading them, and you know what you’re feeding them.
We buy our crickets from LLL Reptiles in the winter. We usually get 2000 .5 inch crickets at a time – this ensures that the crickets won’t get too big for our chameleons before we use them.
After it’s too cold to get the crickets shipped to us we buy crickets locally, which is really a pain because we often have to go to the store two times a week for crickets - and that’s not counting the times we go to buy crickets and the store doesn’t have any available .
We feed our crickets Orange Cube Complete Cricket Diet 12 oz, from Doctors Foster and Smith.
Jeff likes it because it’s easy to clean up out of the cage, and it doesn’t blend in with the mess the crickets make.
It’s also a complete food, so we don’t have to water the crickets, and worry about crickets drowning.
We’ve also had the best cricket survival rate while feeding our crickets the Orange Cubes as well.
In addition to that, we also don’t have to worry about moldy, smelly cricket food.
We’ve been really happy when we’ve ordered from Doctors Foster and Smith, and our most recent order was no exception.
We ordered the Orange Cube Complete Cricket diet Tuesday night with regular shipping, and recieved it today.
Of course we’re only one state away, but that’s still pretty impressive.
We do occassionally feed our crickets other foods, but the Orange Cubes are the easiest ones to use, and the ones we use most often.
