Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I am considering starting up a Superworm colony along with a Dubia roach colony. I've been under the impression that a savannah monitor should be fed primarily insects, yet it seems most people who have large monitors feed them primarily rodents. Why is this?

My guy is still feeding only on insects and occasional turkey, but by the time my colonies are established I figure he will be much larger. As they grow large do Savannahs lose interest in the insects I mentioned? Is it simply unrealistic to get them full on bugs?

I would prefer an all insect diet, but if I have to feed rodents that's not a problem at all, just trying to get my plans in order here.

>>I am considering starting up a Superworm colony along with
>>a Dubia roach colony.

Zophobas that escape into the substrate can set up a population of darkling beetles in the enclosure. I don't know about savs, but timors just ignore them (maybe they taste bad or something) and then you have to deal with an infestation of the things.

>>My guy is still feeding only on insects and occasional
>>turkey, but by the time my colonies are established I
>>figure he will be much larger. As they grow large do
>>Savannahs lose interest in the insects I mentioned? Is
>>it simply unrealistic to get them full on bugs?

I've never seen a healthy sav turn down a hisser or discoid roach. Dubias are a bit smaller than these, but not too much smaller, so savs would probably chow down on them too. I know my argus happily munches on them. She does ignore the much smaller turkistan roaches, though (at least while I am watching).

Luke

Yeah I feed mine dubias all the time. I like the dubias because they are sexually dimorphic and don't climb glass or fly.

I used to be into a insect based diet for the monitors but now am more into a rodent based diet for savs. I came to this conclusion based on what I saw with my own reptiles not what I read. I think a rodent based diet suplimented with insects is ideal for them. The key is the temps. Hot spots, cool spots, dark places to hide.

The worms and turkey I feed as a rare treat but have no intention of ever breeding the superworms. I'll throw the monitors a piece of turkey or chicken or steak leftover once and while too. I'm not going to buy it specially for them though. They need mice. Just my $0.02

By the way the sav in that video is not mine just thought it was a real looker and a good eater.

Thanks for the replies both of you. I think I am definitley going to try the dubia colony as they sound too prolific not too, not to mention bigger and healthier than crickets too! Not sure about the superworms, I'm thinking it might be more trouble than it's worth.

And Elidogs that savannah feeding on rabbits video is sick! And I mean sick as in good and bad. I do understand the food chain, but those cute little rabbits were crying on their way down to the belly! I hope the rabbits were too young to have developed teeth, if not couldn't they bite the lizards insides on the way down?

No I don't think they will bite on the way down. A live adult rodent can severely injure reptiles though. Thats why almost everyone here feeds frozen/thawed rodents.

I just want to clarify there is nothing wrong with feeding turkey. Its just that whole prey items like mice have a lot more nutritional value for the monitor. For example ground turkey is probably just the select cuts of meat on the bird. Where as the whole mouse is just that, fur, guts, eyeballs, feet, tail, meat everything. So turkey on occasion but mice and insects as the staple diet.

Sometimes I wonder about people.

A monitor is a predator, and as such, knows how to kill its prey and consume it. They also know whats harmful and what is not.

They have been at that, for what millions of years. By comparison, humans are NEW, and only been around a tiny period of time.

Anyway, a healthy monitor knows when to kill and when to swallow alive. If it cannot do that, its because you are keeping it in subpar conditions. You know, conditions where it becomes insane and cannot function for itself. You responsibility is to keep your monitor healthy enough to act like a monitor. Not treat it like a invalid.

About turkey, hahahahahahaha you said, its prime cuts, do you really know what ground turkey is made of. hahahahahahahahahaha

Its a turkey dog. Its the meat not used for anything else, or what falls off the conveyor belt. or gets caught up in the machines. hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha prime cuts. Sorry, people are so hopeful.

Do you really think people are going to take "prime" cuts, and debone them and pack them up your you and sell at a lower price. hahahahahahahahahahahahaha guezazzzzzz.

your right, whole prey items are best.

You can feed NY steak to them if you want its just not a complete diet like say a whole rodent. "Turkey dog" falls into the category of imcomplete diet as well.

I would agree they are for the most part smart enough to know what to eat and what to avoid.

OTOH Eating cane toads is not too swift and sometimes they get overpowered by the very creatures they were trying to consume like say pythons.

I really don't know how to explain this. But a diet of whole rodents, is the best possible diet. But, you must supply good husbandry for it to BE THE BEST.

That is, for a monitor to progress, it must have energy, It must also have a normal operating metabolism. To have that, it takes external heat.

Unlike humans, warmblooded. Reptiles have a range of temps they operate at. To work efficently, reptiles must be able to choose the temps they need. To operate efficently, they normally work at the upper end of that ability. LIKE WE DO.

Rodents have a lot of energy, so to be used "NORMALLY" they need to have the ability to reach the metabolism where they can utilize that energy. If they do, they grow like weeds, and reproduce like crazy. If they cannot, that energy is stored as fat. If that continues for a long period and they cannot use this stored fat, its becomes harmful.

Whole insects are great, but do not contain the energy needed for normal life events, growing, and reproducing. Well, thats wrong, it would work, but they would have to consume far more then your willing to feed them.

They work great if all you want your Sav to do is be alive.

If your temps are low and the monitor cannot raise its metabolism, then insects are "better" As they less useable energy.

That means, insects are better at low temps, but low temps also will end up with a dead monitor. of course, it will take a couple of years.

So, if you wanted whats best for your animal, you would offer a range of temps(minimum basking temps of 150F) with room temp cage and offer a diet of whole prey items. Like rodents, birds, and insects. With the majority of the diet being rodents, during the times of activity, breeding season thru foraging season, and insects during the off season, winter etc.

While the behavior of one temp, feeding on a schedule, works OK for such reptiles as snakes, it has proven to not work with monitors.

To prove that, all you have to do is look around and see how many people are having any success. Any friggin kind of success.

99% of all the savs purchased this year, will be dead next year. That is history.

Once you understand the above, monitors including Savs are super easy and grow like weeds and if suitably paired up, reproduce like crazy. Getting pairs is really the hard part. Cheers

lately i'm reading about monitors diet in the wild not being rodents.Well for them to feed entirely on these other organisms,which they do,you have to understand how much the monitors have to consume of the other organisms to subsist like Frank says.These are organism present the monitors the best OPPORTUNITY to eat-they just have to eat more.

It doesn't seem to work that way. In the case of reptiles and monitors I watched. They can subsist on insects, but need something more to grow quickly and reproduce.

They seen to look for a huge energy source. Lets take gouldi type monitors. They locate bat roosts, chicken coups, snake, turtle, croc eggs and such to gain large amounts of energy. Those are the types of food that allow progress.

In between that, insects will carry them to the next day, and the next day, etc. in a way, waiting until a good food source is found.

This thing is very simple. To grow and reproduce they must consume more energy then they use. In captivity, you can keep your conditions consistant, then measure the amount of food to see what causes growth and how much. You can do the same for reproduction.

if you feed once or twice a week, monitors will not grow much or reproduce. Feed them daily, and they will. Its so very easy to test this.

Once you done this many many times, you will have a REAL idea of what kind of energy it takes to allow monitors to reproduce and grow.

Lets use Krusty as an example. he is producing argus in a regular fashion. He knows what it takes food wise to support that. All he has to do is reduce the amount of food and see at what point they stop reproducing. Its not magic. But it takes a certain amount of repeated success to allow you to understand this.

Then reverse engineer this. If krusty only fed his argus insects, how much would it take to gain the equal success??????

Again, its very easy to test. measure the amount of insects it takes to recieve X level of reproduction, then compare that to X amount of rodents.

In my experience, they would have to feed the entire day and much of the night to equal that of rodents, in captivity, or clutches of eggs, or nest raiding rodents, bats, etc.

A friend of mine finds tristis raiding swallow nests. There is a paper on a tristis consuming a GIANT cockatoo(major mitchells)

medium odatria, feed on other lizards to gain this type of energy gain. of course, they consume insects too.

With the smaller monitors, they utilize blooms of insects. With them, a grasshopper is equal to a Bird or rodent to a larger monitor.

I Once read a paper of about a male lacie that had something like two red fox pups, a spiny marsipual and a bearded dragon. In its stomach. That is not an insect diet equal.

I reminded Daniel Bennett of nile monitors raiding croc nests, Their bellies were dragging on the ground. Not a small amount of food. Or any one of many species with their bellies dragging after feeding on carrion(road kills)

Somehow, most folks forget what they read, and somehow want to defend what they want. No offense, but if they were designed to feed on insects, they would not have the ability to consume animals nearly their own size.

Again no offense, but it baffles me how folks cannot put two and two together. its about that simple, they need to consume huge amounts of energy to accomplish tasks that require huge amounts of energy. Again nature would not support abilities that are not used.

The problem with what your reading is not about rodents or equal, its about context. What are they feeding on, AND THAT CONTEXT. Most studies do not give a crap about what the animals are doing. Is it a single failing male? at what season is the stomach contents done, etc etc etc. The same goes for temps. Most field work does not attempt to take body temps according to task. Which as we know varies by task.

In our field work. We make sure the animals are evolved in life events, I want to know what they are doing when they are basking, at what temp to they stop basking, at what temp do they return to a heat source. What condition is the subject, is it female, gravid, male, neonate, growing, skinny, etc etc.

All of those things are the CONTEXT of what temps are needed. They are also in context to what kind of prey is needed to support a certain task.

Simply put again, does a female about to develop eggs, require the same amount of energy as a none producing old male?

So before you use those papers, you need to make sure the information you read is IN CONTEXT to what your doing.

The papers that wrote those things were right, in there context. They never said, what was in their stomachs at ANOTHER TIME. It was not their job, But its your job to put information you read in REALTIME CONTEXT. What does you monitor need to perform the tasks you are expecting. ITs not those papers job to do that. Its yours. Cheers

No offense taken,i was just pointing out that when people read those studies about the stomach contents of wild monitors-that's all they see.To me it's just common sense to feed monitors rodents,more bang for their buck in a complete package,in the context of proper husbandry.No different than those saying to supplement diets with turkey-people read that and instead of an occasional supplementation now it's ground turkey diet with the occasional rodent.There is such an array of advise out there people tend to go the path of least resistance-instead of common sense.

heres the deal, I THINK, hahahahahahahahaha

You have academic advice. That is information taken and given by folks who do not do this, but instead read about doing this.

You have academic biology advice. Which is similar. Its information and advice given without the conformation of actually doing this. Its not actually applied to captivity or nature. Its only test is math.

Again,about with the above, its really important that the reader, the one looking for USABLE information, ask for context. What is any information used FOR.

In this case, academic is defined as aside from, theoretical, and not applied. Once this type of information is applied and successful, its no longer academic or theoretical, it then becomes applied knowledge/methods, something that done right, WORKS.

What we have here on this forum is the actual keeping of animals, and all of its information is to be applied.

Why some of those nice folks want to push their academic, theoretical information here is beyond me. It would be ok, if there was no actual applied information/methods. Fortunately, there is lots and lots, decades of, and thru many generations of applied information/methods.

Why folks keep gravitating to academic or theoretical information is beyond me and not my problem.

Now I going to say something I can/will get picked on for saying. I have no idea why people will pick theoretical information over proven applied with superior results, information/methods. In my mind, that is a very very stupid decision. The reason I think that is, its not about the people, its all about the monitors, its the monitors that suffer. They keep dying by the thousands, and all because of peoples odd egos. As Eric Burton(the animals) once said, THIS REALLY BLOWS MY MIND. Considering how much failure there is in the hobby. Using theory is stupid(its already failed over and over) Common sense would allow us to think most people are above that and use whats already been proven.

IT seems keepers egos, want each individual to REINVENT the wheel. Sorry, its been done, once its been done, the game is over. We already have the wheel and it rolls way better, then that square block of academics and theory does.

There, you squezzed a rant out of me, hahahahahahahahaha