Tracking food (by weight)

[NERVOUS]

Just curious, do any of you track the amount of food your Chameleons consume (by weight)? In case it isn't obvious already... Yes, I recently acquired gram scale and now feel compelled to weigh EVERYTHING!

Coincidentally, I've also been experimenting with Lobster roaches (as feeders). My Chameleon absolutely loves these things. In fact, he eats 5-7 full-size adults each time I offer them to him.

After 3 days of him consuming what I can only describe as an obscene amount of food (especially given his size), I started wondering how much 5-7 full-size adult Lobster roaches weigh compared to crickets. I estimate the ratio to be 7-10 medium sized crickets for every 1 full-size adult Lobster roach.

NOTE: I haven't actually weighed the food items in question, but I plan to soon.

I'll report the results here once I have them. In the meantime, I'm curious to hear any/all feedback on food weight.

Thanks!

 

[Chris Waring]

A possible better way might be to weigh the feeder and work out its volume. This would give you the density of each item. Size is no guarantee of density.

 

[jajeanpierre]

Just curious, do any of you track the amount of food your Chameleons consume (by weight)? In case it isn't obvious already... Yes, I recently acquired gram scale and now feel compelled to weigh EVERYTHING!

Coincidentally, I've also been experimenting with Lobster roaches (as feeders). My Chameleon absolutely loves these things. In fact, he eats 5-7 full-size adults each time I offer them to him.

After 3 days of him consuming what I can only describe as an obscene amount of food (especially given his size), I started wondering how much 5-7 full-size adult Lobster roaches weigh compared to crickets. I estimate the ratio to be 7-10 medium sized crickets for every 1 full-size adult Lobster roach.

NOTE: I haven't actually weighed the food items in question, but I plan to soon.

I'll report the results here once I have them. In the meantime, I'm curious to hear any/all feedback on food weight.

Thanks!

I've wondered that as well. People talk in feeding so x-number of feeders, but not all feeders are made equal.

It would be interesting for you to weigh him before you fed him and then after you gave him a big meal.

 

[ChameLIonLover]

Just curious, do any of you track the amount of food your Chameleons consume (by weight)? In case it isn't obvious already... Yes, I recently acquired gram scale and now feel compelled to weigh EVERYTHING!

Coincidentally, I've also been experimenting with Lobster roaches (as feeders). My Chameleon absolutely loves these things. In fact, he eats 5-7 full-size adults each time I offer them to him.

After 3 days of him consuming what I can only describe as an obscene amount of food (especially given his size), I started wondering how much 5-7 full-size adult Lobster roaches weigh compared to crickets. I estimate the ratio to be 7-10 medium sized crickets for every 1 full-size adult Lobster roach.

NOTE: I haven't actually weighed the food items in question, but I plan to soon.

I'll report the results here once I have them. In the meantime, I'm curious to hear any/all feedback on food weight.

Thanks!

I'll be lucky to get my cham to eat ONE roach!

 

[NERVOUS]

I'll be lucky to get my cham to eat ONE roach!

Just curious, are you hand feeding the roaches?

 

[Matt Vanilla Gorilla]

My babies loves their lobster roaches! My goal is to switch between feeder insects before they get bored of them! I do not weigh chameleons nor bugs. I just feed, feed, feed! For my growing, young Chameleons I test their eating capacity every two to three weeks by feeding them as much as they will eat in the morning and again in the afternoon. For the next couple of weeks they will be fed two thirds of that total amount. This method seems to work fine for me. I feed the adults a cording to a totaly different formula.

 

[Connorology]

I think it makes more sense to track food based on calories rather than weight, though weight will be a component since caloric values are usually given in calories/gram. The weight alone won't tell you much, as you don't know where the weight is coming from. It could be exoskeleton which isn't digested, it could just be water. For example, silkworms weigh more than crickets, but crickets have about 1 cal/g and silkworms only have .67 cal/gram. (source: http://www.chameleonnews.com/02SepDonoghue.html).

Exotic feeders like lobster roaches might not have published nutritional data, but you can approximate based on the closest species with published data. Complicating matters, a lot of sources I have seen will give numbers without units or without the appropriate units. For example, according to Mulberry Farms, butterworms have 87 calories from fat. But they don't say per what unit. It can't be per gram, because that would be more than 100 times the caloric content of a silkworm and about 30 times the calories of a waxworm, which just doesn't make sense. It could be per ounce, which would put the fat content at slightly more than a waxworm, but again, no way to tell.

What might be worth doing is weighing out ~10 or so averaged size feeders of each type, getting a mean weight, and then working through the published data to figure out calories per feeder instead of per gram. Then the conversation could become how many insects to feed to reach a set calorie count instead of just a recommendation for a set number of insects.