phoenix worms gut loading and such...

[Sire Pascal]

Good evening everyone,

I have a little dilemma and was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction. Yesterday i bought 25 super-worms and they all seemed to be doing well. Today when i got home they were all dead. I kept them on the small container that were sold to me at petsmart, So i recently bought 100 phoenix worms online and they should be arriving sometime next week on Wednesday am hoping. How or whats the best way to keep them in? and also whats the best way to gut load them? i left small cut pieces of apple and strawberry in the container for the worms and it was still fresh when i checked on them. I was planing on doing the same for the phoenix worms but now am not too sure. Also if anyone has pictures of how they keep them it would be extremely helpful, thank you

 

[jannb]

Welcome to the forums. I keep super worms in a Tupperware container with the middle part of the lid cut out and screen hot glued in for ventelation. In the bottom of the container I keep about an inch and a half of oatmeal mixed with dry gut load. Cricket Crack makes a dry gut load just for super worms and I use that when I have it. I also feed them just a little bit of fresh greens or some carrot a few times a week. Now for the phoenix worms you really don't have to do anything to them except keep them in the container that they come in in a fairly cool place but not the frig. The frig. will kill them. I keep my in a wine cooler set on 65 degrees. You can put a little dry gut load in for them but they will live with out it. Are you using a good dry gut load? If not you should be along with your fresh fruits and veggies.

 

[Sire Pascal]

Welcome to the forums. I keep super worms in a Tupperware container with the middle part of the lid cut out and screen hot glued in for ventelation. In the bottom of the container I keep about an inch and a half of oatmeal mixed with dry gut load. Cricket Crack makes a dry gut load just for super worms and I use that when I have it. I also feed them just a little bit of fresh greens or some carrot a few times a week. Now for the phoenix worms you really don't have to do anything to them except keep them in the container that they come in in a fairly cool place but not the frig. The frig. will kill them. I keep my in a wine cooler set on 65 degrees. You can put a little dry gut load in for them but they will live with out it. Are you using a good dry gut load? If not you should be along with your fresh fruits and veggies.

thank you, the forums have been of great help raising my panther chameleon. Your response is excellent, tomorrow i will buy the materials to keep the super worms in as well as the oatmeal mix and dried gut load. Am glad to hear (or rather read) that the phoenix worms dont require much care

 

[ridgebax1]

When I kept phoenix worms for my chameleon, I kept them in a small critter keeper and added over ripe fruit or baby food fruit and bread. They are eating machines and are quite good at eating pretty much anything you give them. I bought 300 at a time from rainbowmealworms on ebay for ~$21.00. They had the healthiest worms as far as I am concerned. Anyway I would remove them from the sawdust bedding material. You can do this one of two ways. I had a strainer that was made for sifting out mealworms or superworms so I would dump them into the strainer and kind of shake and tap it until most of the sawdust stuff was gone. Then I rinsed them with warm water and put them into their new home with their food. You could also just dump them into a bowl of water as they will float but I think the sawdust stuff would float too so it would kind of defeat the purpose. When I wanted to feed them off, I scooped out a chunk of whatever mess was on the bottom of their container and rinsed them with warm water which made them very active and fed them to my chams. They are really no trouble to keep you just need to make sure they don't run out of food. You can also keep them at a cooler temp as was suggested but you do have to be very careful because if it is too cold they will die. Wine coolers (the appliance not the drink) are a good choice.

 

[kinyonga]

Phoenix worms...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetia_illucens