Vet's Thesis: Diet's Effect on Bone Dens & Calcium

[Chameleons Northwest]

Here are copies of the published results of a controlled study Guido's vet did, pertaining to the effect of certain diet's on skeletal density and serum calcium. This was his doctoral thesis. The study participants were desert spiny lizards. He is keenly interested in promoting herp health through proper diet. 7 pages (which all run together below), including radiographs (seen at the bottom of this post). The Veterinarians' office is in Seattle.

 

[Dave Weldon]

Howdy,

Thanks for sharing this info. It certainly reinforces the need for proper gutloading and dusting. As can be seen in the results, crickets and superworms (and likely with many other commercially raised insects) don't contribute much calcium to the requirements of our critters unless they are gutloaded and/or properly dusted with the appropriate type of calcium product. The Tetrafauna ReptoCal product (not to be confused with Rep-Cal etc.) has other vitamins and minerals combined with calcium its and vitamin D3. Phosphorus is one of those that is added and since our typical feeders already have a poor calcium-to-phosphorus ratio this makes it an undesirable dust. Vitamin A is also added but it appears that it isn't in huge quantities. Based on their mentioning of 20mg of dust adherence, I calculate that to be about 4 IU of vit A. Some reptile/chameleon medical books talk about 6-9 IU/gram of crickets. That is about what you'd get with 5-6 medium crickets dusted with this product. Don't forget that it is possible to have quite a variation of dust levels depending on your dusting methods. The bottom line is that many of us prefer to control calcium intake separately from D3 and vitamin A. This product doesn't allow that to happen. Their results show that there may be a relation to the death of some of the test animals and the ReptoCal dust that they used to supply calcium. The other scary result was that low bone density didn't show-up in blood tests but only from x-ray results....

 

[Chamgirl]

Very interesting read that, thanks for sharing. Quite scary but important to know.