Buy Reptile Food

People often wonder how to keep and breed meal worms as reptile food. Amphibians eat them as well, so even though they’re not exactly lovely to look at, you can save time and money if you breed your own. They are easy to keep, and you’ll want them on-hand to feed your reptiles, anyway.

Regular meal worms are commonly used to feed reptiles and amphibians, and sometimes birds that are kept as pets. You can buy the regular type of worms in your local pet store, or online. These larvae are roughly an inch long, and their color is golden yellow.

Meal worms are actually the larval stage of the darkling beetle. These beetles go through a period of complete metamorphosis, with the stages of egg, larva, then pupa and beetle stages. The female beetle will lay between five hundred and a thousand white eggs, shaped like beans. The eggs hatch in roughly a week, and the larvae are very small at that time. The larval stage is the one you want to watch, since it is at this point that they are valuable for feeding reptiles.

When you buy meal worms from a pet store, they may instruct you to store them in the refrigerator. As unappetizing as this sounds, many reptile keepers will have a mini-fridge for this purpose. But you don’t actually need to refrigerate them unless you want the growth of the larvae to slow down. If you keep them at room temperature and feed them, you’ll know your reptiles are getting a healthy meal when you feed the meal worms to them.

Tags: food, meal worms, reptile

This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Reptile food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.