So, I have decided to stick to crickets as my primary food source for my Fire Bellies. They like guppies and meal worms, but I use those supplementally. The mealworms are their weekend treat and the guppies swim in their water until they eat them all, as they want. About 8 in a week btw two frogs. So, the every-other-day food is crickets. I want to gut load them properly for both nutrition AND pigment enhancement. The internet is so swamped with contradictory info that I decided just to keep it here. The most information from actual owners seems to be here anyway. John suggested Rahasdy Superpig for dusting and that sounds good. As for "natural" gut load, what fruit/veggies should I NOT use? I don't want to drop in strawberry scraps only to find out they are poisonous to toads. So can someone let me know what to absolutely not give them?
Also, to avoid the drowning issue, I see sites saying to use soaked cotton balls. Someone said, though, that the crickets will eat them and it's bad for the toads. Is this true? Can I use soaked paper or cotton balls for the cricket water?
You can also use fish flake food. No tomatoes.
Honestly, I'm not sure what would be toxic to amphibians if it were used in the gutloading of insects. You know, Repashy also makes a product called "bug burger" which is a great gutloading product for insects.
Founder of Frogforum.net (2008) and Caudata.org (2001)
Avoid spinach, it has a chemical in it that prevents the absorbtion of calcium in your herp.
While non-organic fruit contain pesticides, a good rinse should get most of it off. However, some pesticides used on crop farms will seep into the fruit or vegetables. It is not clear to me if it is unsafe for some of this exposure digested by the feeder insects is safe to feed them non-organic fruit. I've seen people's colonies thrive off of normal fruit without harming the reptiles or amphibians. I feed mine normal fruit or vegetables with a good rinse, everything seems fine. Only in moderation once a week. If you want to go a step further you can skin your fruit or vegetables and brush them off with a vegetable brush, but the pesticides that do get into the fruit or vegetables there's no way of getting rid of that unless you buy organic. It's not very clear what kind of fruits or vegetables not to give feeder insects, all should do fine. Most commonly used are: carrots, oranges, apples, lettuce. As far as the Repashy commercial gut loading, that seems fine to me. Don't know too much about their product, I just make my own high protein homemade chow for my feeder insects.
To avoid the drowning and provide your crickets with a source of water, the most commonly used product are water gel crystals found in any plant nursery. Non-toxic dried polymer crystals that expand to 400x their size into little 'gel' looking type cubes. The crickets drink from this, doesn't dry out like paper towel and cotton balls (Plus as you mentioned, the crickets will probably ingest some of that cotton), inexpensive (Lasts forever...), easy maintenance clean up, no drowning. Harmless to your herps. 6 tsp. of dried water gel crystals with water will make a gallon jug of water gel. Hope this helps...
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