Our basilisks are rescues, and were probably originally WC. So no, we didn't start them on veggies as babies.

As far as veggies go:

Collard greens should be fine, we chose mustard greens simply because they were cheaper in general. Most berries work fine; since we mix our salad in bulk and freeze it, we just grabbed a frozen berry medley with strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries from the local safeway; we just mix the berries directly in. We've used primarily yellow squash, but we've used zucchini as well; we grate this into the salad.

We also add prickly pear paddles occasionally, although you should be careful to make sure there are no spines.

A good guide to vegetable mixes for iguanids can be found here:

http://www.anapsid.org/iguana/igdiet.html

This guide was written specifically for iguanas, which are entirely herbivorous, but can easily be adapted for basilisks.

Since we freeze our salad, we add powdered vitamin B1 (thiamine) to the salad when serving it; the freezing process generally destroys this vitamin in vegetables. We don't enrich with calcium, primarily because we enrich the crickets with it instead.

I couldn't tell you how hard it is to get basilisks taking vegetables; we never had problems with ours, but different animals respond differently. The best suggestion I can give is to offer vegetables, and if the basilisks repeatedly refuse to eat it, then it might not be worth bothering. However, I suspect you'll find they'll graze a bit along with eating their insects.


I hope this helps a bit.

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