I was thinking of adding some more verriety to their diet. The 5 Mailis i have are currently eating a organic spring mix from Earth Bound. They are doing well, but i think they could be doing better. I also change it up with endive & dandilion. What works well for you?
I think you find the following website most useful, it is meant for bearded dragons but the nutritional facts are univseral and staple food items will be the same for any species = ) http://www.beautifuldragons.com/Nutrition.html
The only spring mixes I could find around here have romaine and spinach in them, so no good for uros. I feed him a mix of collard greens, bok choy, endives, and escarole. Not all at the same time, I mix it up alot, but collard greens are typically a staple. He loves dandelion greens as well, and I feed him them occasionally, maybe once a week as well. Sometimes I shred some carrot and add it in as well, which he seems to like. I spray the salad with a calcium spray and also a vitamin supplement spray. As for seeds, I have them always available to him, and I use a small bird seed mix. I also give him lentils, which seem to be his favourite thing too eat. I am kinda using them to tame him, by giving him some lentils whenever he comes out on my hand, so he associates me with the provider of the lentils. Its kinda funny now, he always wants to be handled because he knows he gets lentils when he comes out!
No worries! He goes nuts for them! I have never seen him refuse a lentil. I have heard they like it even more if you soak them and the split, but I haven't done that yet. How are your uros for temperament? I have heard that in general they are pretty calm, yet don't really go looking for human contact. Mine seems to be pretty cool. He is active, always climbing or digging. The odd thing is, when either of us come into the room he will come over to where we are and stare at us, and if we put a hand in, he will climb on and run up the arm and sit on our shoulders lol. Must be the lentils lol. Even if he is in his hiding spot, if we come in and start talking to him he will come out too see us! He seems to be very favourable to human interaction. He even gets along well with my cat!
That's awesome that your guy is so happy to be handled! They're usually a bit more stand-offish than lets say beardies or leos but some can be very well acclimated to handling I've gone through the ringer trying to find my little guy something that he will eat consistently... it's kind of still driving me a little insane actually. I have gotten the Earthbound mix and broken it up (he's still quite little so I have to break apart everything until it's tiny and not include stems) but the package always goes bad and I wind up wasting so much of it... So I decided one day to mix it all up in a food processor with carrots, lima beans from a can, and a bit of pumpkin I had around.... I blended it all up and then froze it in ice cube trays. Well... for a while he was eating it... He seemed to really like his defrosted mushy stuff. Then one day he revolted and decided he didn't like it anymore Since then I have been buying the baby spring mix in a bag and feeding him fresh every day with re-hydrated juvie beardie pellets and juvie iguana pellets (the little round ones that look like the rainbow and smell like fruit). I give him this if I run out of lettuce on a rare occasion. Now here in lies the bigger problem. No matter what I do he won't eat his food with any sort of powders on it - no calcium/vitamins (I've tried Repi-Calcium, Bone-Aid, ReptiVite and some other one in a green bottle I can't remember the name of) or any supplements (I've tried Repashy SuperVeggie Dust thing and an old awesome supplement for bearded's salads from some beardie website). Nothing! He doesn't even take a bite of his salad at all! If I put only the tiniest sprinkle on it and mix it up afterwards I've found he will eat most of his food.... If I don't put anything on it he will eat it all, if I put some on it and don't mix it so it's mostly on the bottom he won't even touch it! Arg! He's driving me crazy!!! Lol. Just found pics on my cell of when I did the salad thing.... mixed it all up in a food processor in a couple batches and then froze it into ice-cube things (I used a silicone icecube tray so it was easier to get out the "icecubes" of lettuce, lol) I then take one cube out at a time and let it defrost in the fridge and take out as much of the mush as I need per day. And here is my little pesky, picky baby Spike lol:
Oh! And his dry food mix that I leave in his tank in a little bowl all the time is of Millet Seed, Pure bee pollen granules, red and green lentils, and split yellow peas. He is in LOVE with the red lentils and will pick them out of the bowl specifically. I just went to Whole Foods and they have this "bulk" section that you can fill little baggies with however much you want of rice, beans, seeds, etc... it was perfect. I think I spent like $6 total and got a supply that's lasted me since I got him... 4 months ago. Wow, he's almost 5 months old! Ornates grow so darn slowly!
Where to start?........ I don't type much, so it drives me crazy to sit here and type when my mind is going faster than i can type My Uros will run when i try to get them, however once i do they are pretty calm. As for food what a pain in the a Out of the 5 uros 2 are doing great and growing. The other three are up and down all over the place with their weight. Just like Sticky said when ever i dust with something other than ground up tortoise pelles they (the 3 non eaters) won't eat the kick a salad i made them. The real prob is that it is a comunity tank so i can't monitor what and how much each of them are eating..SIGH... O... and yes this little paragraph took me 12 freeking minnets W/ bad spelling and all
Oye, lol. Is there any way you could put temporary dividers in the tank to keep the three out that aren't eating as readily? Not a necessity but it would definitely help you to diagnose what's really bugging them and maybe keep a better eye on which ones are eating and which ones aren't.... It's driving me crazy with the powder! Just out of curiosity, how much do your uri's go through? Like how fast do they eat that bag of lettuce? Andrew - how much does your guy go through? And have either of you found a good way to store lettuce? Ugh, the stuff goes bad in the fridge so fast it's driving me nuts!
The longest I can get them to last is a little over 2 weeks. What I do is take paper towels and press individual leaves dry before transfering them to a new plastic grocery bag. Typically the drier you can get them the longer they will last. Try not to freeze them because I've read that takes away from the nutritional value of the greens and can lead to a vitamin deficiency later on down the road. (Could be why Spike stopped eating the frozen mix. Animals are very intuitive about their nutritional needs.) With the powders, have you tried thoroughly misting the greens and then sprinkling the supplements on top of the water so it sticks better, than flipping the leaves over so the non-dusted parts are face up? Or you could try veeeeeery finely shredding the produce, misting thoroughly, dusting, and mixing very well. A lot of the tortoises at work hate when there are dry powders on their food for some reason, so I know how frustrating that can be. You just have to experiment a little. =)
I just get new stuff every week. I make sure to close the bag they are in super tight without air, and keep in in the crisper in my beer fridge lol.
Lol awesome. Thanks Cammy! I'll have to try that, because this whole throwing away so much lettuce is really annoying me... Just for reference I took a pic of all of the things I've tried on and in the salad at different times: (disregard the light bulbs, lol. My Powersun MVB died on tuesday and the new one hasn't come in yet so I have a make shift system going on right now, lol)
Ok so I figured I'd post my findings from my little experiment so far... After a convo with Nay that we had last week some time where he relayed a lot of good advice and ideas to try from Deer Fern Farms I formulated a plan (insert evil laugh here, lol). So 1st step last week - get my uro eating MORE (he'd been eating but it was a small bowl and he wasn't even finishing it, especially if I put anything on it... very sporadically he'd eat a whole bowl) So I took the advice to actually NOT cut up the lettuce so much. I had previously been shredding it and taking out the tough stems in the middle for fear he would choke on it or something. I now leave large leaves and only take off the bottom part of the stem that doesn't have any "leaf" on it. He LOVES it DFF noted that the Uro's actually like to rip and tear at their food and it might spur them on to eat more. I am happy to say every day for 4 days he ate almost the entire bowl Then, last Friday I decided to hatch "step 2" in my plan... I took the pieces of lettuce (the larger pieces) and prepared them like normal, then I readied some juvie iguana pellets (upper right corner of my pic in the previous post) and I placed a good amount of them sporadically throughout the leaves. Guess what, he didn't eat a single flipping leaf. But the leaves did "stay" nice and not dry up as badly because of the extra moisture from the pellets. The weird thing is that he used to eat them.... anyway, the next 2 days I went back to step 1 to make sure he ate a good meal (AKA just the large leaves, nothing on them). Monday rolled around and he had been eating nicely for me all weekend so I decided to try to up the ante a bit and try to have him eat some of the repashy super food. So I put it in the bottom of his bowl and slightly mixed the leaves around a bit so at least a little bit of it was on all the bottom of the leaves. I'm happy to say that he eat some... but by the time he got to the bottom of the bowl I think there was too much powder on them for him to eat.... or maybe it was the smell of the powder from the bottom of the bowl? I'm not sure. Either way he only ate the top and most of the middle "layer" of his lettuce. Tuesday was back to "step 1" again just to keep up his eating habits and to keep him guessing, lol. Then yesterday before I left for work I was feeling pretty confident in my ability to trick him a little and I really wanted to get some calcium into him.... So I took the larger leaves and wet them so they were a little moist and I put the calcium powder in the bottom of his bowl and dipped each one carefully into the powder on one side. Then put all the leaves in the bowl with the calcium side down. He actually ate about half the bowl before he realized he had been tricked into eating calcium :-P The little punk even spit out a half chewed piece when he got to the powdered part! Back to just the large leaves today, no trickery, lol. Anyway, figured I'd share my little musings and experiement with you all. Maybe it will help someone else with their pesky uri.
LOFL!!! I love it! you're right they are punks I've done basicly the same thing, however my uros love the crushed (powder) tortouis pellets sprinkled on the wet leaves. I also rotate 3 different types of greens, mixed with the base spring mix every other day.
So a bit of an update.... this is weird. My Uro went on a hunger strike for a week and a half that ended abruptly one monday morning 2 weeks ago. No idea why, nothing was changed, I tried feeding him everything... nothing worked. Now though, he's eating like a little porker! OMG he's eating me out of house and home! I bought the huge bin of the mix greens from Costco about a week ago and he's almost done with the ENTIRE thing. I had ONE salad! I have no idea what it is... the weather maybe? It was kind of rainy and not sunny out for almost a whole 2 week period and now the suns been out for days. Anyone notice anything off lately?
sorry i have not been on for a while, it's summer This is great news!!!! my uros are eating well also. I did however figure out, if i put a paper towell in my Earth Bound's plastic contaner(on top of greens) it lasts twice as long. Try it ,and see if it works.
I am SO trying that... I've done the "separate some out" into little baggies thing and that's worked so far because if one piece goes the whole thing doesn't rot... Oh a sad note, it seems that my little guy has lost a claw/tip of his toe He's still too small and skittish (darn ornates and their slow growth!) to hold but I check on him daily when I feed him and then later on in the day. It looks like between sunday and monday he lost a claw I don't know exactly where it could have happened either.... maybe between his tile and the glass? I don't know. No infection, no blood anywhere in the tank that I could see... I'm going to keep an eye on it just in case.
Very interesting... i came home one day and found some small pools of blood on a couple of rocks Needless to say i was ing out, my largest uor had some blood on one foot...strange no cut....WTH. With all uros checked out, i looked at his foot closer, and looked like he was missing a nail. I have no clue what transpired...perhaps he was trying to climb the wall bark.he seems to be just fine now
