Properly Feeding tree lizards is vitally important, in most cases we do it wrong because most books are misleading or totally off base.

This post is for all lizard keepers who experienced fatalities especially with egg binding tree lizards, also for the concerned keeper wanting a healthy captive.

First a little biology, what characterises a tree lizard?

Of course being arboreal is the first and foremost characteristic, but theirs a lot more to it then that, evolving as an arboreal means physical adaptations like lighter bodies, many things we don’t see at first glance.

Lighter bone structure; ground lizards rely on muscle power to escape predatory or capture prey, they have thick bones to hold larger muscles.

Limited muscle mass; being arboreal means relying on stealth and ambush rather then flight and chase, they have little need for large muscle.

Little ability to store fat in tail or legs; in lizards fat naturally stores over muscle as muscle feeds on fat, tree lizards have little leg and tail muscles so theirs no need or ways to store fat there.

Why all this talk about fat?
Simply because the only place these lizards can store fat is there fat bodies (2 abdominal pouch) and once these are full fat can only accumulate in the liver, unlike humans they cant store fat under there skin. Now don’t get me wrong the liver is not for fat storing, however we often force our captives thru bad feeding to store fat in the liver, hens fatty liver syndrome.

I know some of you have been breeding other lizards forever without any liver problems, yes but most lizards can burn bad fats via muscles in the form of energy, tree lizards on the other hand do not move allot and sins they have no other fat storage, they are prone to fatty liver.

Now iv already covered the husbandry of these lizards and most keepers understand about metabolism and heat relation, assuming these are understood and supplied and that nesting options are good, then feeling is the only potential problematic.

Lately the arrival of new insect feeders have enriched our captives diets, perhaps to much for tree lizards, I have recently analysed a few commercially available species, I have also analysed via biopsy the liver of various lizards. this can be applied to your captives in general regardless of specie.

Prey; ………Moi%.......Kcal/g………Cal-fat%............Cal-Prot%
Earthworm…90……….0.5…………..20………………75
Mealworm….60……….1.8…………..50………………50-70
Superworm…60……….1.5…………..70………………28-30
Waxworm….50-60…...1.8…………...85……………....15-20
Silkworm…..80……….1……………..20………………80
Crickets……75………..1-1.5………...35……………...65


Understand these analyse will fluctuate depending on what you feed your insects!
Calories from fat are wasted energy and what you need to limit in your lizards diet.
I keep my feeders on oak-bran and provide carrots as moisture, summer I feed them grass, dandelions and trifle (best foods on the planet) as these are high energy low fat foods.

Some literature advise on feeding fatty foods when a lizard in either thin or gravid, this is wrong, providing a staple diet of low fat foods (vitamins-mineral supplemented) is all your lizards will ever need, gravid or not a steady supply of good foods will promote health.
Technically; fat proteins affect the reproductive system in many ways, these are empty proteins that cant support life, they impair the immune system and the resulting are dead embryo’s, moulting eggs or very week eggs, they also have there toll on the female, she will be undernourished and week from these empty calories, mostly unable to grow and nest in due time resulting in egg bind age, and death.
These useless fat proteins are the last to be used as energy, they eventually constrict vessels and disrupt your females cycling.

I conducted this study because some of you lost a few females egg bind, though I have never experienced such problems with my captives, I needed to understand how and why such problems occur, hopefully this post will help you avoid such misfortunes.

Happy herping




Ps. Feel free to re-edit this post as my English is not perfect, however the information is accurate enough to be useful.

[ Reply To This Message ] [ Subscribe to this Thread ] [ Show Entire Thread ]