Another Gutload thread!

[StickyTongues]

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to know if there is a way to know if your gutloading is nutritious enough to skip the dusting of calcium and vits? They dont get dusted in the wild so there has to be something good enough to feed them to eliminate it. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

Danny

 

[ferretinmyshoes]

We are limiting our captive chams to one or two types of feeders that may not even be part of their natural diet and they are limited to only what we feed them, whereas in a jungle there are hundreds of types of bugs feeding on even more diverse plant life. We are trying to recreate what they would normally eat, which is obviously working well for them since they are so abundant in the wild. So what they would get naturally is incredible diversity in food and gutloading that we just can't replicate. Excess calcium is easily excreted whereas a deficiency can be very detrimental so in my eyes supplementing should not be stopped even with great gutloading.

 

[aliguori]

Hi everyone,
I just wanted to know if there is a way to know if your gutloading is nutritious enough to skip the dusting of calcium and vits? They dont get dusted in the wild so there has to be something good enough to feed them to eliminate it. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks.

Danny

The common cricket that most of us use as a staple has a relatively poor phosphorous to calcium ratio. The main reason to dust with calcium is actually to fix this ratio more than to provide dietary calcium.

Also, in the wild, there is significantly more diversity in food sources. In particular, many large lizards get a much higher amount of vertebrates which naturally have higher calcium levels.

There's also a lot of debate about how effective gut loading is in delivering nutrients. Most feeders have incredibly small stomachs so practically speaking, very little gut load is actually getting delivered.

Allen Repashy has a write up on his site about his rational in formulating Calcium Plus. It's one of the best explanations of the basics of reptile nutrition that I've seen on the internet.

http://www.store.repashy.com/vitamins-and-minerals-in-the-superfood-products.html

 

[sdheli420]

lol, basically what ferret is saying (by the way ferret IS a master, and will deny credibility like jannb too) but you would literally need about 1000 feeders of different varieties to even get close to just the variety the wild offers them..also they are eating waaaaay more than we offer for gutload to the insects we offer our chams...if you lived in madagasgar, you could feed them without supplementing since they would be feeding off of native foliage..keep in mind they need all this stuff from us really only because tht island hasent changed for literally a million years, so they all evoled into needing what their native habitat offers..kinda sucks, but at the same time, thats whats soo cool about these lil creatures!!