chamelon diet

[dfercho]

Hello,

I am currently feeding my Cham 10 crickets and 1 large silkworm daily, and have a few questions:

1. I'm buying silkworm pods from coastalsilkworms.com; my first pod lasted about a month, and only a couple of the worms died, but supposedly there is only enough food supplied for a couple weeks. so questions are:
   1. how long can silks survive without food?
   2. if they still appear healthy for a couple weeks after their food has diminished, are they still nutritional for the Cham?
   3. These silkworms keep building cocoons; the first pod had 3 of them, and all 3 hatched with wings. What do the winged silkworms like to eat (still mulberry leaves?); and are they just as nutritional for the Cham when they fully develop?
   4. Will silkworms eat red mulberry tree leaves, or just the whites? I bought a dwarf mulberry tree thinking I could grow the silkworm food, but then read dwarfs sprout red mulberrys, so it isn't the correct type that silks eat
   5. lastly, are silkworms more nutritious than super worms? Being that super worms are sooo much cheaper, I would like to make that switch. Silkworms would be fine but keeping them is messy, costly, and I suspect I'll need to start purchasing extra food for them for as long as I would like to keep them.

Thanks for your input!!

 

[jajeanpierre]

Think about what you are asking.

Animals, even insects, don't suddenly stop using calories. Starvation might lower the base metabolic rate but the animal will still use calories to survive. If those calories are not provided by fresh food, where do you think they come from? They cannibalize their own bodies.

How nutrient rich do you think starving feeder insects are?

You need to feed your silkworms daily so they remain a healthy food for your chameleon. Why go to the expense of feeding silkworms when you end up turning them into garbage. The amount of food that has been shipped with any live silkworms I've ever bought has lasted a couple of days. Buy a package of dry chow and make up 1/2 or 1/4 of it according to directions and keep the remaining dry chow sealed up in the fridge.

I feed my silkworms a mix of fresh leaves and chow. I would love to feed them only fresh laves but they would strip my 20' tree in no time.