Posted by:
sunbirdx
at Sun Nov 20 19:00:01 2005 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by sunbirdx ]
Has anyone here traveled to the outback and done an insect biomass calculation? I live and do biology research in a desert (the sonoran), and let me tell you, the most abundant animal food source in ANY desert are its insects. The reasons deserts can support such a variety of reptile life is due to the fact that insects are highly abundant. I seriously doubt any of the above posters have enough experience with desert biology and biodiversity to make any statements on the amount o food available or ingested by wild beardies. I would also be interested in hearing the sources from where this "theory" was gleaned. And how would you decide how much to feed your beardie? Are you going to average the intake of wild beardies over a ten year period, to reduce the effects of rainfall on insect populations? I am willing to bet beardies do better in a wet year than otherwise. What if you only collected data in a dry year, and end up starving all of your beardies....Seems difficult to mimic nature.
Don't get me wrong, there are more problems with reptile husbandry than with any other commonly kept animal. However, basing a feeding regime on a petstore and on some belief that insects aren't available in the wild (with absolutely no evidence to the contrary) is ridiculous. Do your research, tell me of the insect fauna of the outback, their availability for dragons, and the typical intake of a wild baby dragon, and I will be the first to change my feeding regime. But until then, I will stick to letting my babies eat as much as they want, and limiting my adults insect intake.
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RE: Bearded dragons typically fed too much???.... - sunbirdx, Sun Nov 20 19:00:01 2005