Reptile & Amphibian Forums

so on friday me and my mom got douglas, my 2 month old beardie, a little thing of mealworms and we were excited to try them out on him. he was soooo excited and loved them sooo much. so he got like 7. then i went to feed him the next day and he wont eat crickets, plus i just saw on here that baby beardies should not eat too many mealworms because of their exoskeleton so now i shy away from feeding him the worms, but that is all he will eat. i dont know if he just really likes the worms and he is boycotting the crickets or what. lol. but im kinda scared that he might have an impaction or whatever, he has pooped a couple times and his back legs work fine so far. but all he has eatan in the past 2 days is like 3 mealworms because he wont eat the crickets, and im scared for my baby! please help!
thanx!

you should definately not feed your baby dragon too many meal worms, you are right about that. Does the baby show any interested in the crickets at all, or does it just ignore them totally? Also, are the crickets the right size? If the crickets are too big, it could be that dragon is intimidatd by them. It could also be that the dragon cant catch them, or if you bought it from a pet store, it could have just been raised on meal worms by the ignorant pet store employees and is not very good at catching the meal worms. You could try hand feeding it the worms. My dragon will eat pretty much anything I hand feed him. Also, do you try to feed it any greens at all? I know that babies diets are more insects than greens, but if its pretty good about eating its greens, than you could just offer it nothing but greens for a few days, and then offer it crickets, and not offer meal worms for a while at all. But you wanna make sure its eating something, that really important. You also wanna make sure your set up is completely correct, I.E. cage size, TEMPERATURES, UVB/UVA lighting, substrate, etc.
Let us know a little more. good luck
-Dustin
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1.0 Bearded Dragons
0.3 Fat tailed geckos
0.1 Brazilian Rainbow Boa

my beardie is from di and doug, from the show in minona a couple weeks ago, i dunno if anyone knows them or not. this morning he ate 2 crickets. yea the crickets are a good size for him. yes i offer him greens but he usually wont eat any of them. thanx for that info!

Hi, This is Doug from D and D Dragons- I am the one who sold this dragon. In our research and experiance your dragon, Douglas (same as mine,lol) is much to young to be eating any meal worms. He was never given any prior to the ones you fed but was only fed small (1/8 inch approx.) cricketts and fine chopped greens mixture. Feeding mealies at this age has a very good chance of causing impaction which is why we won't feed them until the dragon is about 6 months old. You should have recieved a care sheet and shopping list when you got him and I believe it says not to feed a young beardie mealies. Please, if you have any questions, call us (608)271-7238 or email, we would be more than happy to answer them for you. I am glad you got him back on crix though.