People often ask us what our various reptiles like to eat. And frankly with so many different kinds of beasts, feeding time can be a bit of an ordeal. Generally Matt takes care of feeding everyone in the house (including me), and he is certainly the gourmet chef. Not everyone eats every day, and we try to stagger things so that it's a little less work, but last Tuesday we had to feed everyone.
It all starts with cactus:
This is the base of Baba Yaga's diet, and Tamama and Sydney also get a bit. It's super nutritious, sticky, and full of moisture. It's also, incidentally, a right pain in the arse to find. When we move, we plan to fill the entire front yard with prickly pear. The neighbors will love that, right?
The other most important ingredient is calcium. Matt crushes up some cuttle-bone and puts it in a shaker, so we can mix it with everything. Reptiles require a lot of calcium, and a lot of vitamin D to fix the calcium. Without those two ingredients, they get metabolic bone disease, which is the number one killer of captive reptiles.
Baba Yaga also gets grass pellets. This should really be her base diet, because desert tortoises are grass eaters, but she was raised on lettuce and has become a little bit snooty. We rely on the cactus to stick to the grass, so that she gets both the food she likes and the food she needs. When they're available, we'll also give her flowers, or a slice or two of something orange. Tortoises love orange things.
Tamama also needs a few greens in her life. She prefers lettuce, but we give her a bit of cactus with calcium. She'll usually eat a couple bites and leave the rest for her crickets. She's one of the few that gets fed every day, and she likes it when we hand feed her the greens.
Once she's finished her greens, we toss in a few crickets. She is a crazy bad-ass cricket hunter! No cricket is safe from her. Of course, she moves so fast that I wasn't able to get any good shots of her hunting. Bearded dragons are ravenous, and she'll go through 100 crickets in a week. We make sure to feed the crickets well, too, so that she gets the nutrients from the food they eat. This is called "gut loading." Usually they get some sweet potato or a slice of apple.
Sydney gets the fanciest feast. Like the others, she gets some cactus. But she also gets a spoonful of dog food. Mix it all together, sprinkle it with calcium, top it with a few berries and some mealworms, and you have one skinky feast. Yum, yum!
Frankly, its disgusting. But she loves it. Of course, to feed her one must first dig her out. And then she'll sit there glaring at you for a while before falling to. Like a little kid, Sydney always skips her vegetables. But we make sure she always has the option--and we try to cut them up nice and small to hide in the stuff she really likes.
Grendel is actually the simplest to feed. This brilliant fellow invented Repashy's Crested Gecko Diet, which is a powder specifically formulated to meet all of the nutritional needs of any rhadodactylus gecko. All you do is mix it with some water, and you're good to go.
To prepare Grendel for meal time, we first turn off the light (which is only there to keep the plant alive, honestly) because she is nocturnal. Then we give her a good evening rain with the spray bottle. Sometimes she'll lick some of the moisture off the walls of the tank.
Then we pull her out of her house and have her eat a little off our fingers. There are two reasons for this: one is to tell her there is food present, and the other is because it's so much fun when she licks you with her sticky pink tongue.
Matt puts her down next to the food, but she usually climbs back up to her mushroom shelf until after we've gone to bed. She comes down in the night to eat a little bit, and then she smears the rest all over the walls of the tank. Messy gecko.
Lastly, we fed Ariadne.
WARNING: The next bit is about feeding a snake. It involves dead things and a snake swallowing them whole. If you're squeamish about such things, take this as your chance to quit reading and go look at some kittens.
Ariadne eats mice. We don't particularly believe that pet snakes should be fed live prey, because of the danger to the snake and to the snake owner. So we buy our mice frozen in packs of 50 or so.
To make them appealing to Ariadne, we warm the mouse under her heat lamp--10 minutes to a side. That brings it up to body temperature, so that she will both see it and find it interesting.
While the mouse is heating, we put Ari in her feeding box. We never feed her in her house, because of the danger that she will associate a hand coming into her tank with food. That way leads to bitey snakes. As soon as she goes into her feeding box, though, she goes into hunt mode. She's actually a little bit scary when she's in there, because she's just waiting for something to strike at.
When the mouse is warm, Matt drops it into the box with her. Sometimes he has to make little scritchy noises to draw her attention to it, and sometimes he has to dangle it enticingly, but most of the time she finds it right away. She strikes at it, and then constricts it. She holds it in her coils until she's completely sure it's dead.
It's interesting, because this seems to be an ingrained neurological response pattern. As soon as she has a hold of anything, she'll coil for the same amount of time every time. Once she got the mouse by the tail, and the tail came off. She did her entire coil and swallow routine with just the tail. Then she had to start all over again when she found the rest of the mouse. Once she's done holding it, she swallows it whole. Matt and I are usually watching a movie during this part, to give her some privacy and, honestly, I forgot to take a photo of it. Oh well.
And with that, everyone is fed. Butterstix personally oversaw every step of the process. So you can be sure it's true.
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