Your Reptile and Amphibian Resource and Information Site

Back to Fence Lizards Forum   Forums   Home   Members Area  

Fence Lizards Forum

Newmama11   Newmama11   Jared T   Newmama11   Jared T   Scat   Newmama11   Jared T   Greatballzofire   _Jd   Jared T   Xe_King   Jared T   _Jd   _Jd  
 Member  Message

 #2054831


Newmama11
View Profile

 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

okay so thanks to all for posting to my last thread and i will post pictures. i had s few questions on the eggs taking 3 months to hatch and yea that is a LONG time. i almost burried the eggs cuz i thought they must have been dead! then one day i saw my cat hovering over the incubator and i thought Hmmmm something must be moving in there. sure enough 7 baby lizards. the incubator was a peanut tin with moist dirt in it that i kept in the window sill for natural heat. i made a little tunnel in the dirt and placed the eggs in it. then i poked holes in the top and that was it. the mud stayed moist, the tin stayed warm in the window, and the eggs hatched . so i will try to find some pin head crickets what should i feed them in the mean time? i read online that they might eat bits of apple not sure if thats true. so what to feed babies for now?!?!



08/11/09  11:55am

 #2055135


Newmama11
View Profile



   Message To: Newmama11   In reference to Message Id: 2054831


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

just got tiny crikets, meal worms, calcium sand and a new aquarium for our 7 new fencie babies. hope they thrive!!!



08/11/09  08:35pm

 #2055151


Jared T
View Profile



   Message To: Newmama11   In reference to Message Id: 2055135


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

Remove the calcium sand. Although the manufacturer states that it’s safe, I would remove it to avoid compaction with baby lizards.
08/11/09  09:02pm

 #2055262


Newmama11
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2055151


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

thank you jared T. i will take out the sand i only put a little bit just to be on the safe side! the rest of the bedding is reptile multch. but yes i will remove it. will they eat the meal worms? cuz the baby crickets look just a little big!
08/11/09  11:31pm

 #2055284


Jared T
View Profile



   Message To: Newmama11   In reference to Message Id: 2055262


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

Meal worms are a no no in my opinion.

How big are the crickets? If they’re wider than the space between the lizards eyes and longer than the top of their head then don’t feed them.

Didn’t you order pinhead crickets?



08/12/09  12:17am

 #2055422


Scat
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2055284


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

Congrats on the new babies. Hope all goes well.



08/12/09  10:17am

 #2055554


Newmama11
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2055284


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

the people at the pet store said baby crickets are about the same size as the pin head ones. and they really liked the meal worms! they’ve been eating them up. why? is that bad. the people at the pet store sugeested them.... they seem to be doing okay, am i gonna kill all these little babies or what?!?!?! I mean, if they were in the wild would they just eat whatever moves anyway. why are meal worms a nono?



08/12/09  02:34pm

 #2055623


Jared T
View Profile



   Message To: Newmama11   In reference to Message Id: 2055554


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

The exoskeleton on the meal worms are harder to digest. I’ve never fed my fence lizards meal worms because I’ve heard it can lead to compaction, in which, meal worms aren’t good for a main diet.

You can order pinhead crickets at flukers farms or even LLLreptile. Google works. Their pinhead crickets are true pinhead crickets. They look like little tiny black ants. Not 1/4" crickets, or 1/8" inch. Pin head.
08/12/09  04:26pm

 #2055702


Greatballzofire
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2055623


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

If you can find a bunch of little black ants, that will work in a pinch. Another thing that works is small termites which can be found under rotting wood. The downside of ants is they can climb, where as pinhead crickets cannot. But ants are so common, if you find a batch just cover the terrarium with fine enough screen so they can’t escape. I have used these insects in a pinch, but now raise my own crickets so I always have pinheads to adults on hand.
08/12/09  06:39pm

 #2058539


_Jd
View Profile



   Message To: Greatballzofire   In reference to Message Id: 2055702


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

THEY EAT APPLES!!! The first lizard I caught as an adult was actually a tiny baby male, & it gave me the idea to own one & is why I looked around for one in the first place. I wish now I had kept him. Anyway, I was weeding in the yard, i remember I was slamming a hoe or shovel into the ground to dig up some persistent sweet-gum roots & I pulled the shovel out & threw something pale and maybe moving into the air which caught my eye. I have NO IDEA how I didn’t kill this little buried guy. He had no visible injuries, but wasn’t moving much he was only about 2 inches long total snout-vent and was seemingly in shock. I picked him up & pet him, brought him in & cut an apple slice for him, before I knew they only ate insects. Left him in a small red bucket by our vent (it was putting out heat at the time) and finished my work in my yard, hoping to give him time to come outta shock & re-release exactly where I caught him(otherwise I couldn’t keep working where I was... So by the time I got done it was nightfall & he still wasn’t moving much and the apple didn’t look touched, I felt mad at myself & it felt wrong to release him when he couldn’t see to find a place to hide & sleep, so I left him inside overnight by the vent. In the morning the apple slice was chewed almost back to the peel, over half gone & I was surprised that much had gone into him, he was moving & freaking out at me so I released him & he scampered off.

I want to find the same one & mate him with my current lizard, but we have about 50 lizards around here in the woods. So it’s doubtful. happy ending, cool story & the main reason i’m even here in the forums...


Secondly, I decided meal worms are fine but not in excess. To explain, I’ll give you an example, you remember the No Carb Diet? Where people only ate meat. They have since found out it can drastically increase deterioration in the brain because carbohydrates are vital to nerve cell maintenance. You shouldn’t live off of one thing alone, and unless the thing your talking about is a balanced staple food, you cannot live off of one thing alone. You CAN technically live off pasta for the rest of your life, but you won’t be nearly as healthy.

Crickets are a lizard staple food, they can live off of them for the rest of their lives. But variation is good. I feed my fencey a meal worm once a week if that. The first time I tried meal worms I gave her two to replace her crickets for that day. Her poop the next day was 50% white (exoskeleton) chitin output. She loved them though, easy to catch... So I decided no more than one in any given 2 days, and try and only give her one every 5 days or so. I would probably not feed any meal worms to any baby lizards, but meal worms are a pretty safe occasional food. I would never use meal worms as a staple & I would never feed ANY lizard SUPER WORMS, which are a different sub-species with bigger jaws & different and bigger bodies and have been said to lead to spine issues inside your pets.
08/17/09  02:33am

 #2059990


Jared T
View Profile



   Message To: _Jd   In reference to Message Id: 2058539


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

And I thought the white stuff on their poo was dried urine. It’s really digested exo-skeleton?

Cool apple story btw, he must have been really hungry!



08/18/09  11:29pm

 #2060248


Xe_King
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2059990


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

either that or a mouse got in the bucket.. lol



08/19/09  11:48am

 #2060657


Jared T
View Profile



   Message To: Xe_King   In reference to Message Id: 2060248


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

but how did the mouse get out I wonder. Hmmm, that lizard must’ve had a mouse for dinner ay lol
08/20/09  12:07am

 #2061188


_Jd
View Profile



   Message To: Jared T   In reference to Message Id: 2060657


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

Yea, the bucket in question was upright & a little over a foot & a half deep. I highly doubt it was a mouse, & I doubt the lizard would have been alive had it been a mouse.



08/20/09  10:32pm

 #2061213


_Jd
View Profile



   Message To: _Jd   In reference to Message Id: 2061188


 What to feed babies , while waiting for crikets

Oh yea, & Jared... It’s not exactly exoskeleton, the two are just closely associated & I connect the two without explaining further. I think the lizard deification is just like what you find in birds, the white is the output of Urea acid, the major end-product of the metabolism of all nitrogen-containing compounds. This is the way all organic bodies dispel excess nitrogen, and birds & lizards do it by combining nitrogen with amino acids & forming it into urates. Chitin, which forms mammal’s cell walls & insect’s exoskeletons is a long-chain polymer of a N-acetylglucosamine with the chemical structure (C8H13O5N)n. Although some of the hydrogen, much of the carbon, and virtually all the oxygen should be digested within the body, the compound left behind is one that consists of a notable amount of nitrogen. So in order to rid the body of this digested form of chitin, they just form these urates & push em on out with their normal looking poop.

You are right to call this a lizard’s form of ’urine,’ but in technical terms that’s not exactly true. Most birds and lizards don’t ever urinate and don’t have anything to call urine, this is why they don’t need a separate channel for such a function. They simply conserve moisture by absorbing almost all of the water in their wastes before they let it out, which is why they don’t really need to drink much either...

We preform a similar process as mammals, but what we produce is yellow and has a high ammonia content, & is called urea (think about urethra) & guess what? It takes a whole lot of water to push it out.


So now you know...



08/20/09  11:14pm


Back to Fence Lizards Forum   Forums   Home   Members Area