Hi everyone. I have just purchased my first Chinese Water Dragon. He is 6 months old and his name is Rory. He has a 20g (long variety) enclosure with a heat lamp, large water bath (thing), small food bowl, artificial resting log, sand and your basic bark chips that I purchased with him. I have about 4-6 crickets that I put in his enclosure with him close to every day and I refill his food bowl every day. In his food bowl I put romain lettuce, bananas, skinless grapes, squash, zuccinni, peach slices, and other fruits/vegetables. I have owned him for a little over a week now and I have not seen him touch the fruits/vegetables. He fills himself up on the crickets all of the time. I have tried to expand his variety a little by adding small minnows to his water "bath". He did not touch those either before they died of being in the same place with no oxygen flow for so long. I do not know how to get him to eat anything other than those darn crickets! I feel he needs more variety in his diet for health reasons and I am not sure how to get him to eat other things. I do make sure he gets his calcium by coating the crickets with ReptoCal which also has Vitamin D3 included in it. Any advice on how to "expand his intake" would be greatly appreciated. I have tried a ton of varieties of fruits/veggies/other food and currently am at a loss. Please help! Thank you for any imput. Meire
Hello. We own both Austrailian (brown) and Chinese (green) water dragons. We have bred the green ones and have only been able to get them to eat veggies as hatchlings and even then it was VERY rarely. If you can get them to eat veggies great. If not, I would recommend doing exactly what you are doing. Continue to gut-load your crickets with all the veggies and fruits you can. When your dragon gets older he will very gladly accept pinky mice (live or frozen) which will help supplement the vitamins. You could also blend your fruit and veggies into a liquid and inject it into your feeders. Our dragons will eat it right out of the syrringe so we dont need to do that. I guess they figure if we go through the trouble of blending it up for them the least they could do is drink it Not sure why they will drink it and not eat it. We have gotten our big male Aton to eat veggies by dropping chunks in front of him when he is eating crickets. He gets in such a frenzy he'll eat anything. He even ate the crickets potato that i had to go in after because i wasnt sure if that was good for him. We generally take our dragons to the vet twice a year and they are in perfect health so i wouldn't be overly concerned if they wont eat veggies as long as you are gut-loading your live feeders properly. If anyone else has a solution I would love to know about it though. Chris
