What do you do when your bearded dragon isn't eating? That was the concern we have had for the last 2 days.
It tunrs out that we have been a bit lax on the whole feeding thing. Not that we haven't fed them. Rather that we have chuked 15 or so crickets in each day knowing that they hadn't eaten all of them from the day before. They'll pick 'em off in the end, we thought.
The result instead was teh our beaded dragons weren't eating ANY of them?! Weird!
We took a bit of expert advice, and they said: "get all the crickets out of the vivarium and leave them for 24 hours". It was at that point we realised that we had messed up a fair bit, cos we must have cleared out about 20 or so crickets, hidden here, there and everywhere!! We spent lots of time finding them and we still missed one that appeared the next day!!
Here's the theory:
Lizards identify food by movement primarily. If there is movement all the time, they block it out as normal movement, and familiarity causes them to not recognise it as food. This is particulary so if they have over eaten before. By depriving them of the movement and the food, their system gets "reset", and everyone is happy again!!
So that is what we did. Last night we carefully introduced 2 crickets at a time. Dash ate 4 in the end, Rapethal ate none still. 2 got away that we removed from the Viv. Today we were pretty worried. Why was Rapethal not eating? Was he afraid of the crickets? Was he afraid of Dash.
Today both Beardies have been desparately exploring hte viv for food - a good sign!
Our plan tonight wasd to remove Dash and then introduce the crickets to give Rapa and chance. However Dash was more jumpy than normal, presumably cos he was hungry! So we went for it anyway. 4 crickets at a time. And Rapa was the first to eat - hurray!! It was a relief. I think they had somewhere around 8 each and they all went. We decided not to overdo it today and keep them keen for tomorrow!
No one said it would be eay i suppose!
