I've never succeeded in getting her to take nightcrawlers. Crickets she'll eat, but not nearly as quickly as they run around and hide and lay eggs. So besides the fact that I can't keep them in a food dish so there's the danger of substrate ingestion, there's also the problem of winding up with thousands of little pinheads in there that are too small for her to be interested in at all. I've nothing against them as staple, but for this particular toad in this particular setup they don't work. She has a three foot wide pen, with solid sides to obstruct her view of the rest of the room, and still waits until it's dark and she's alone before she eats. So I don't see the seperate feeding tub trick working any time soon.

I don't plan on making mice a staple, nor was I trying to suggest other people do. Most of her diet is large nonclimbing cockroaches, and she gets calcidust at least once a week. Since it seemed that the fuzzy loosened her up, if a similar problem occurs again I will do the same thing, but otherwise I'll stick with insects and supplements. Death heads aren't very hard-shelled; they're more like a larger version of discoids, so the meat to shell ratio is much better than when I was letting her fill up on dusted superworms.

What level of mouse development were you having problems with? Mice that eat solid food don't have the same loosening effect as very young ones. I'm not even sure the trick would have worked with a hopper, which was one of several reasons I didn't opt for one, although she's certainly large enough to gulp one.

Anyway, she's eaten every day since then, although I'm not feeding her as heavily as I was before. And from the looks of her water dish in the morning, all is functional again.
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0.1 Coastal Carpet Python (Boots)
0.1 Western Hognose Snake (Bebe)
0.1 Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)

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