Woodlice as Staple

Does anyone here have any experience with using woodlice as a staple food? I know that most people will say that variety is key, but my tiger is picky and a lot of good staple foods, he won't eat so I'm rather stuck when it comes to variety so I'm not looking for people posting about feeding a variety of foods. Its not really much of an option for me with this guy. I've tried, earthworms, butterworms, silkworms, hornworms, phoenix worms, and even roaches. The only thing I can get him to eat fairly regularly is crickets. So I'm looking to start a woodlice culture and try those out since they are high in calcium and have a good Ca ratio.

So I want to know if there is anyone out there who feeds mostly just woodlice as I've heard that having too much calcium in an animal's diet can cause other nutrients to not be absorbed properly so I wanted to know if anyone else who's used mainly woodlice have had any problems or if their animals are healthy. Thanks.

Are you sure that he's not just reluctant to eat while you're watching? Some of my salamanders will refuse food while I'm hovering over them unless I give them something they really like, but the populations of less favoured prey species in their habitats decline over time and the salamanders continue to grow, so they must be consuming them when I'm not around.

If you want to use woodlice as a staple, you're less likely to encounter problems with excessive calcium in the diet if you use some of the small tropical species with soft, partially mineralised carapaces.

Another thing you could try are triops. They probably taste closer to daphnia than to anything else and probably have a similar nutritional profile, you can grow them to whatever size you like and they wriggle about a lot when removed from the water and dropped onto dry land. I've fed them a handful of times to terrestrial salamanders and they were enthusiastically accepted.

I have had Tiger Sals that were worm shy and would just refuse them out right. Woodlice are ok for tigers but you are still going to have to mix in gut loaded ckickets. Woodlice have hard shells and could cause impactions if fed heavily. Woodlice one day gut loaded crickets the next should be ok though.

@peter5930: Since he's been hand fed since I got him, I don't think its him being shy to eat but thanks for mentioning it anyhow. I'll have to look into the triops perhaps, don't know if I could even get something like that around here though.

@Billyannone: Woodlice have shells that are made up of calcium, not chitin and are much easier to digest then chitin so they don't carry that risk of impaction. Woodlice are isopods which are crustaceans, different then regular shelled insects.

I'm thinking that the small "tropical" woodlice may be too small for a tiger sal. Have you tried him on garden-variety woodlice? If he likes them, then there's no harm setting up a culture. I have succeeded in culturing them, but I warn you that they are slow to get started. It may take months until you have enough in the culture to use them as feeders.

As long as you're in a woodlouse friendly part of the world it's quite easy to attract them to your garden. Give them plenty of refuges - pots, stone slabs, rocks, cardboard - basically anything dark they can crawl under. I have a number of refuges in the garden and I rotate my harvesting so as to give each one time to re-establish a good collection of woodlice. Using a soft paint brush it's possible to brush them off in to a container. As Jen says, trying to culture large temperate woodlice is a slow process and probably not worth the bother.

I also have newts that almost exclusively eat garden woodlice (we call them pill bugs too because some varieties roll up into a ball) with the occasional spider, slug or fly thrown in. There is no visible trace of exoskeleton in their excrement and the newts are fat and healthy looking. I think woodlice would form a significant % of a natural diet.

Yea, I agree that the small tropical woodlice would be too small for a full grown tiger to eat, and no I haven't tried any woodlice on him yet. I'm getting some this Saturday at a reptile show to start a culture with. I'm not sure if we even have woodlice around here, I've never seen them but then again I wasn't the type of kid to really flip over rocks and other things for bugs. I was more interested in frogs ^.^ I also have no idea if they would really be pesticide free or not, We have large fields on all sides of use and I don't know what our neighbours might spray on those fields or what so I would be a little wary on feeding him wild caught woodlice.

@Mark: Its good to hear that you haven't had any problems with feeding pretty much exclusive woodlice, I would love to get away from crickets if I can so I'll definitely try them out.

And though they are slow to culture, that is actually probably alright for me. I don't mind waiting for the culture to build up before I start feeding them, and since I'm only feeding one animal, I don't really need a feeder that breeds like crazy. I won't need thousands upon thousands of them to keep my tiger going I don't think. Its one reason why I didn't really wish to culture roaches as a feeder, as they breed quickly and I'd be overrun with roaches pretty quickly. Not to mention I'd only be able to use the small nymphs since adults are too big to feed off, and they are illegal here in Canada, which is a shame as they are a really good feeder otherwise.

Thanks for the replies guys, I'll give them a try and if he likes them then I'll work on culturing them and see how it goes.

I've fed temperate woodlice to adult fire salamanders, but they find them difficult to swallow. After choking a few of them down, the salamanders lose interest in them and I think the woodlice become a prey of last resort. I find them useful for keeping habitats clean in part because the salamanders don't tend to hunt them to the brink of extinction they way they do with other prey.

peter5930 said:

I've fed temperate woodlice to adult fire salamanders, but they find them difficult to swallow. After choking a few of them down, the salamanders lose interest in them and I think the woodlice become a prey of last resort. I find them useful for keeping habitats clean in part because the salamanders don't tend to hunt them to the brink of extinction they way they do with other prey.

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Hm I see, well I'll still give them a try and see how they fair, I mean there is still a big chance that he won't even eat them anyway so I'm jumping a little ahead of myself anyhow. I'll be getting some this weekend and I'll try feeding a few, if he takes them eagerly then I'll culture them, if not..well I'm also getting a crested gecko this weekend, I can always feed them off to him/her.