Growing too fast??

[laurie]

My little Quad, Jet my avatar, may be overeating and growing too fast. On 7/11/09 he weighted 7grams today he weighted 12 grams. That is a gain of 5 grams in only a month. His feeding schedule is every day me eats about 8 phoneix worms, or 3 to 4 silkworms or 2 small superworms. He will not eat crickets or roachs. Am I overfeeding him or is he just growing fast? BTW he is4 1/2 months old.

My feelings won't be hurt (I hope) if someone needs to tell me I am being stupid and overfeeding him, or I am being stupid and just worrying again.

 

[luevelvet]

Hey Laurie,

I wouldn't worry too much unless you're noticing that he's not defecating. Just be careful to not over supplement. Ours loved silkworms and was addicted to them until I ran out. Phoenix worms too. Our larger one is roughly 10 grams so we're on par from last month. The smaller one is just reaching 8 grams.

I usually feed in the morning and when I get home from work. They get about 12-15 crickets in a feeding bowl and the same when I get home. They're very active and always tell me when they're hungry by pacing around the screen until I throw some food in. If you want to see something fun, throw some flies in the cage.


Luis

 

[laurie]

Thanks for ithe info on Jet, I do worry but what's a mother to do??

Luis that is funny, hubby is downstairs now getting fly's for both quads and all 4 veileds, they go ape s***. However my panthers won't touch a fly. I forget to list fly's as a feeder sinceI never go near them. David grows them and feeds them. I am a wimp.

 

[Damaranum]

Laurie,

This is a hard topic to give good advice in. I'm not gonna tell you if you feed to much ore not. I only want to tell you some things I think that are important with growing up chameleons. I think there is a big difference in growing up chameleons in captivity and
them growing up in nature. In nature they benefit from growing as fast as possible as this lowers their chance of being eaten and the improves the change for the species to survive. So in nature they will eat as much as they can and grow as fast as they can.

Problem in captivity is we can't give them all good stuff they will get in the wild. So we try to compensate. To achieve this I believe it is good to let them grow a little slower with as good food as possible and feed them not every day. In this way I make sure they stay interested in food and start hunting. I'm not sure this is the right way but in the past I did feed as much as possible and my chameleons did grow very very fast. But in the end I found they where not as long living as I wanted (specially my females). Now I feed less they still grouw quite fast compared to other people I know but they live longer and seem much stronger to me.

On the other hand feeding a lot and growing very fast increases the chance of MBD as they grow faster they need to get more calcium for their bones. I did have this problems in the past with my hoehnelii's.

My only advice whould be to also have a day without food this is really not bad. Chameleons in the wild don't find food every day.

I hope this helped a little bit.

Further it's good to hear he eats that good. Quadricornis is a lovely species to bad the don't seem to fit real good in my chameleon room.