Spice up crickets to taste better...

[rachelk]

Is there something you can "spice" the crickets up with to make them taste better for the cham?

...once again, my cham is not eating his crickets yet everything else, which seems to be everyone's problem every once in a while....

 

[dodolah]

Is there something you can "spice" the crickets up with to make them taste better for the cham?

...once again, my cham is not eating his crickets yet everything else, which seems to be everyone's problem every once in a while....

you can try giving your crickets different gutload (perhaps, one day is carrot, the other day is dandelion, etc).
I would imagine the crickets will taste slightly different.. idk

But, after taking the crickets away from your cham for a while, he will come back to appreciate them once again.

 

[ColorCham427]

rarely, but occassionally i let the crickets not only eat oranges, but i'll intentionally make a mess and they'll walk in the messy wet pile. they'll get wet with the juice from the orange, and give em a citrus smell/taste.

strawberry is also good for that taste thing. i dont have to do it anymore.

to keep your chameleons eating properly. gutload them very well. keep changing the gutload too, never same gutload in a row. timing is everything!

 

[Ryan Jarosek]

I would imagine the crickets will taste slightly different.. idk

dodolah, Are you sure you don't know?

I agree with the different types of food offered to the crickets. What they ingest will have an effect on the taste.

 

[Trace]

But chameleons have a poor sense of taste so the varying gutload and or dusts aren't going to make a huge difference.

Now, because they are so visually orientated, try dusting your feeders with Spirulina. Most chameleons can't resist a green bug.

Trace

 

[Zen Reptiles]

Hi Rachel,

Trace is right about the green bugs. And though I don't know the rationale behind it, they seemed to go crazy for slugs and roaches more than they ever did for crickets or most other types of worms.

The dish was always empty within a few minutes if I had roaches, butterworms, and slugs in there, as opposed to mealworms and kingworms and crickets being in there for days at a time!

I'm not sure about the 'taste' bit, I think they do have a sense of taste even if it is very limited. Many arboreal lizards/geckos evolved to eat/like fruit, maybe try gutloading with grapes, mango, papaya, figs or cantaloupe a few hours before feeding.

My female veiled used to love red grapes (seedless).

 

[susurrus]

Or you can just not feed them for a while. They'll be back onboard if you stop feeding them anything else until they eat the crickets. They can go for a while without food, so it's not a problem to do this. Been mentioned before in all the threads about chams not eating something.