Tiger Nutrition

My Tiger will only eat crickets. I give the crickets calcium-enriched gelled water, cricket feed, oatmeal and various fruits & vegetables. Do I need to dust the crickets with vitamin powder? How does that work? I put several crickets in the Tiger's tank for him to stalk and eat as desired; doesn't the powder fall off of the crickets? Is there a particular brand of the powder I should look for? Sammy is about 4 and seems healthy, but does he need a nutrient boost?

i do dust my crickets some times with vita total from repco products. but i think it wood be wise if you try some earth worms to very good food for your tiger just to variate their diet

Thanks Johan

I can try again, but he's rejected them in the past. I bought some twice and ended up putting them in the compost heap.

Still wondering how that powder sticks to the crickets if not being hand fed.

I don't know how effective the calcium rich gel water is. It sounds like the sort of thing that may work well if the crickets ingest it. If you look at the nutrition article here you'll see that the Ca ratio for crickets is pretty poor. Ideally the ratio should be 1:1 so the addition of Ca is the right thing to do.

The powder dusting only works well if the cricket is consumed shortly after being added to the enclosure. Over time much of it will drop off or be removed by grooming. You can train most salamanders to take food from forceps and this would give you more control of dusted animals. A powder often recommended by experienced amphibian keepers is nutrobal but I'm not sure of it's availability in the US.

In an ideal world you should be aiming to provide a varied diet as this will remove the requirement for supplements. In the wild Sammy's diet would have included crickets but they were probably only a small part. Have a read of this article for ideas.

it happens that bought earthworms are rejected. you problebly wood have more change with the worms from your garden. but be sore there are no chemicals used for killing weeds ore something.
i put some vitamin powder in a box ,than put in the crickets in and shake a bit and the crickets are powdered and ready to use. hope this helps for you

Mark, thanks for the links. I had previously read the food chart. The nutrient chart requires further study.

Here are links to the high calcium cricket feed and calcium fortified gelled water I use:

http://www.flukerfarms.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=21

http://www.flukerfarms.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=24

The company has been raising bait/feeder crickets since 1953 and has a full range of products for reptiles and amphibians. This is where I get the crickets and also tried the meal worms, which Sammy wouldn't eat. The earthworms I tried came from a bait shop.

http://www.flukerfarms.com/index.asp?PageAction=Custom&ID=24

I'd appreciate the guidance of the more experienced members regarding the stated nutritional quality of these products.

Thank you all!

(I have no connection to this company beyond my purchases and hope the guidelines permit the posting of these links. If not, I'm sure the mods will do their job).

On page 2 of this very good article it discusses the use of manufactured calcium rich products for gut loading crickets: http://www.nagonline.net/Technical Papers/NAGFS00397Insects-JONIFEB24,2002MODIFIED.pdf

They make a point of saying how long the crickets should have access to the diet and how they should be kept. A diet of sufficiently high calcium will probably kill the insect which is why I suspect these timings are key. This also makes me suspect that the commercial product you buy is likely to be slightly "watered down" as they won't want your crickets to die. Is there a break down of it's mineral values?

Bait worms are most likely to be a type of compost worm. These emit a foul defensive ooze and are rejected by many salamanders. Try to buy common earth worms, Lumbricus terrestris. These don't emit the ooze and are far more palatable (they can be pretty large so you may have to resort to chopping )

Gee, guess I should go get a Master's in amphibian nutrition! Barring that, I'll check on the worms raised by a member of my barter group. Ugh, chopping... Eek is right. I had a hard enough time dealing with feeding live crickets to the Tiger. Wish he'd eat dead stuff.

I don't have the original container for the cricket feed, so don't know if it has an analysis on the label. Never thought that much about it, but I'm sure that information is available.

In place of the calcium gelled water, there's another product that is both food and water in one. Has a bunch of ingredients including kelp, spirulina, Brewer's yeast, vitamins A, B-12, E, D-3 and calcium carbonate:

http://www.flukerfarms.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=25

Does that sound better?

Mark said:

Bait worms are most likely to be a type of compost worm. These emit a foul defensive ooze and are rejected by many salamanders. Try to buy common earth worms, Lumbricus terrestris. These don't emit the ooze and are far more palatable (they can be pretty large so you may have to resort to chopping )

Click to expand...

I suspect this one is very likely the case if your tiger won't take the worms. Especially if when you say it rejected them, you mean it had the worms in its mouth and then spit them out. If however you mean it tried but was unable to grasp the worms. I've noticed when I feed my tigers crickets and other insects for awhile, they take some time/coaxing to remember how exactly to go about eating a worm. Best of luck to you.

Also does it need a nutrition boost?, I've seen old tigers that have been fed their whole lives on untreated crickets from pet stores with no apparent health defects. Nonetheless it wouldn't hurt to try to diversify the diet a little bit.

No matter what you use feed to crickets, you cannot correct the calciumhosphorus ratio without dusting them. I would highly recommend dusting them - it's not that much of a hassle once you get the right containers and routine going.

The supplement recommended as "tops" in the US is the 2-part supplement of RepCal + Herpetivite. But really, any basic Calcium + vitamin D product would work to correct the basic lack of calcium in crickets.

[[Edit: evidently, when you combine : and p you get a silly ]]

I have one old tiger that shares Sammy's plight - he will only eat crickets. When he was a younger fellow, he enjoyed worms (nightcrawlers, not red wigglers) and other insects...but over the past 7 years his palate has developed a preference for only crickets. With that diet, metabolic bone disease becomes a concern....which is not always visibly apparent but can be seen on Xray. As Jen states, dusting is the only way to assure adequate nutrient intake. To acheive adequate calcium levels by feeding, kills the crickets rapidly...and nutrients apparently dissipate quickly...in the ones that may survive.

I use the product that Jennewt describes. It is purchased as two separate containers and must be mixed just prior to dusting. Small quantities should be mixed and used as the vitamins will degrade over time if the mixed product is stored. I use a small baggie and place the crickets in there and shake. I do one at a time, then hand feed. To your point, if you turn the crickets loose, the powder will fall off and the crickets will also 'groom off' the powder. I don't dust with every feeding as there is debate on the potential for hypervitaminosis, especially with VitA as I recall. But that is a topic for a different thread.

Thanks for the info everyone. I'll see what I can do to keep Sammy healthy. I don't know what kind of worm my acquaintance has, but I've left a message for him to call me. Maybe he can pre-chop some for me.

Guess I'll be in the worm forum if I have more questions about them.

Jannewt, lol, that's funny! But I tried to make one using your formula and failed miserably.