Bearded Dragon Diet
by Richard Adams
Bearded dragons are omnivorous - that is to say that they eat both meat and plant matter.
The wild diet of bearded dragons includes a wide variety of bugs and insects caught as well as berries, fruit and leaves.
In captivity we aim to mirror this as closely as possible, and provide as varied a diet as possible to get as close as possible to eliminating nutrient deficiencies.
Unlike iguanas, which need lots of live food to start off with, then slowly phase over to an almost totally vegetarian diet as adults, the mixture is important in bearded dragons and even adults should be fed live food.
Let's take a look at some of the available bearded dragon food:
Crickets - an ideal live food which you should look on as a staple ingredient. They are fast moving which helps to stimulate the bearded dragon to feed (but also means you'll have a job on if you lose one in the house!). They are highly nutritious, particularly if you feed them with Calcium Plus which helps to fill the crickets with even more goodness.
They are also easy to breed if so want to do (as I do) and cut down down on your feeding bill, and also have a range of different sized crickets available for different sized reptiles.
If you don't want to breed them they are easy and cheap to get hold of from most reptile suppliers, and can even be ordered online here.
Locusts - have a thinner skin (cuticle) than crickets and are larger so contain even more nutrients. They are ideally suited to larger lizards for whom feeding crickets can become quite expensive unless you breed your own.
Unlike crickets which can be kept at room temperature (though additional heat is beneficial if you decide to breed them) locusts will not live long at room temperature.
Coming as they do from desert areas themselves, locusts require similar temperatures to bearded dragons to live for any period of time - 30-40'C is ideal.
So either set up an extra glass tank to keep a reservoir of locusts in, or only buy a few at a time, and make regular orders so that you don't lose many from each batch.
These too should be looked on as a staple in the diet.
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Mealworms - these are beetle grubs, ideal for hand feeding. They do however have a thick skin reinforced with chitin (a protein) to make their shells strong and protect them.
With this in mind they are not as nutritious as the other two species above and so should only be fed in moderation.
I save them solely for the purposes of hand feeding as I find them the easiest thing to hand feed.
On the upside they are very easy to breed in the home and you can store a tub in the refrigerator for some weeks.
There they will lie dormant, and when you want some you can simply retrieve a handful from the fridge and give them a few minutes to warm up and become active. Again they are easy to get hold of.
Other Live foods - there are quite a variety of live foods available these days including waxworms, giant mealworms, maggots, fruit flies and more. I buy some of these more unusual live foods from time to time to supplement my reptile's diets and add variety though I look on the above 3 varieties as the staples of the live food diet.
Meat - some bearded dragons will take raw meat such as beef mince or chicken breast. Beef is high in fat so should only be given in small amounts but it makes life pretty easy for you if you can get your lizard to take part of it's food as raw meat.
Fruit - just about any fruit suitable for humans will do for your bearded dragon so long as it is finally diced. Popular fruits include apples, pear, grapes and banana.
Vegetables - same as above. Lettuce, cabbage, grated carrot, chopped courgette, broccoli etc.
Other Plant Matter - other bearded dragon foods can include nasturtium flowers, courgette flowers, dandelion leaves and watercress.
Artificial Bearded Dragon Diets - there are now a range of dried bearded dragon foods that like dried dog food you can feed straight from the tub. Bearded dragons shouldn't be given cat or dog food due to the differences in nutritional requirements and the often high levels of salt and fat in cat and dog foods to make it more palatable.
Richard is a keen herpetologist with many years experience with snakes, iguanas and bearded dragons amongst others. Richard currently runs two successful web sites, AboutSnakes.com and Iguanas-and-Bearded-Dragons.com. These are great resources sites for and herp keeper.
Mark Chapple is the Author of "How to build enclosures
for reptiles"
Find out how to build home made bearded dragon cages, reptile display terrariums,
making a terrarium model, vivarium construction ideas as well as arboreal enclosures.
Full color pictures, detailed diagrams and easy to follow, step-by-step instructions.
http://www.reptile-cage-plans.com