Feeding tokay horn worms??

[jeninak]

Has any body done this? I was looking for a variety to add to their diet and they seem pretty healthy I found this web site Frequently Asked Questions - Magento Commerce
and I was thinking about ordering some but I want to know I any one else has fed smaller hornworms to their tokay geckos.
Thanks!

 

[Aimless]

I had a big male Tokay several years ago and I fed him big fat hornworms as a treat, a few times a month. he really liked them, but when he smashed them against the side of the viv to "kill" them, green worm guts got all over the glass and they were a real pain to clean. just don't let it get dried on

 

[Riverside Reptiles]

You can give them a try but in general, worms don't tend to do much to stimulate the prey drive of a tokay. They're hunters and tend to prefer feeders that move around a fair amount. From a nutritional standpoint, they're fine as part of a varied diet.

 

[jeninak]

Ya mine love both wax and meal worms so I was gonna try horned.

 

[MdngtRain]

if they like them, they are a good option. my tokays were not interested in them because they did not move fast enough...

 

[Aimless]

if you hold the tail end of the worm tightly in tongs, they'll thrash around. I used to give Mike his worms off the end of bamboo tongs (I didn't use metal just in case he ever made contact, but he was very good at nipping the bug neatly off the tongs).

 

[Riverside Reptiles]

Ya mine love both wax and meal worms so I was gonna try horned.

Just fyi, neither wax or mealworms are very good feeders from a nutritional stand point. I would not encourage continued use of either of those.

 

[jeninak]

Ya I have not fed them to the tokays in some time, for now its just crickets.

 

[billewicz]

:yahoo:As Aimless has noted, Tokay can be very enthusiastic about Horned Worms. The bigger, the better, Heeee, heeee heeee!:rofl:

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

Or let them turn into moths.

Maurice Pudlo

 

[billewicz]

Or let them turn into moths.

Maurice Pudlo

Yeah, Tokay love the Goliath Horn Worms' moth as well. :yahoo: Yummie!

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

For those who don't know how to get the horn worms to pupate; in the wild they burrow into the soil and pupate there, in captivity you can stuff them into tubes (I use el-cheap-o plastic test tubes), a pin hole in the cap keeps air good, then pop the tubes in a dark box for a few days.

Once the larva have pupated you can pull them out of the tubes and use the tube for another horn worm.

Maurice Pudlo

 

[billewicz]

For those who don't know how to get the horn worms to pupate; in the wild they burrow into the soil and pupate there

I just let them burrow in Cyprus mulch. Once they have pupated, I place them in the mulch in the Tokay enclosures. Once they pop out they are free game for the local lizard(s).

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

Cool, that never occurred to me as being an option.

Maurice Pudlo

 

[billewicz]

Cool, that never occurred to me as being an option.

Maurice Pudlo

Again, your test tube/darkbox method is great, it just doesn't work for me with my volume. I'll buy 300 horn worms and start feeding out at each size to various beasts. Whatever has made it to just about pupation goes into a plastic bin with mulch. That could be 60 to 100 worms.

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

LOL, I'm lucky I suppose that all I do is work with the feeders and my critters, time is more or less on my side. That is if you don't count raising kids on the side.

Maurice Pudlo

 

[billewicz]

LOL, I'm lucky I suppose that all I do is work with the feeders and my critters, time is more or less on my side. That is if you don't count raising kids on the side.

Maurice Pudlo

Yeah, OK. Just for fun, multiply your collection by 100. I've got about 500 reptiles that almost all will eat insects. 28,000 crickets are FedEx'ed in every week. Then there is the weekly rodent delivery for the rest of the collection.

Oh and there's the day job too. :biggrin:
The Dobermans, .....
My wife, ....

Did I miss anything??? Oh yeah, SLEEP! :evil:

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

I feed off 10-15k insects daily, 100 rodents every other day between the monitors and snakes, and a handful of nightcrawlers or red worms daily.

I keep around 450 enclosures going at any one time, eight of which are larger monitors, then a few Florida kings, KSBs, Kirtlands snakes, a metric boatload of leos, fat tails, mourning geckos, and blue phase and line bred green anoles, the white-lines, golden, tokay, marbled, and new to the mix are reef geckos. There are a few random critters that my wife the kids or I keep as pets too.

I do my own insects and mice, I buy rats and the worms though.

I feel your lack of sleep every night.

Maurice Pudlo

 

[billewicz]

I feed off 10-15k insects daily, 100 rodents every other day between the monitors and snakes, and a handful of nightcrawlers or red worms daily.

I keep around 450 enclosures going at any one time, eight of which are larger monitors, then a few Florida kings, KSBs, Kirtlands snakes, a metric boatload of leos, fat tails, mourning geckos, and blue phase and line bred green anoles, the white-lines, golden, tokay, marbled, and new to the mix are reef geckos. There are a few random critters that my wife the kids or I keep as pets too.

I do my own insects and mice, I buy rats and the worms though.

I feel your lack of sleep every night.

Maurice Pudlo

:blushing: Oh crap!!! I was thinking of someone else when I said "multiply times a 100". Sorry, that lack of sleep really showed it's ugly head on that one. I only mannage about 300 enclosures. :blushing:

But really, a lot of my experience is based on a larger collection so telling the casual collector how I do things is a great reference but not always practical for a handful of reptiles.

In a day or two I'll post my photos for cricket bins for gut loading and then dusting, etc. But working 30,000 feeders is a bit different than a $5 bag of crickets from Petsmart. The principle is still the same.

 

[MauricesExoticPets]

Your focus seems more refined than mine though. My madness was born out of a few death dealers devastating our local reptile market by pumping in tens of thousands of dollars worth of low quality ultra low priced reptiles then packing up and bailing on the customer base.

I feel the frustration from multiple ends, first on the feeder end where one would expect an increase in demand with the increased numbers of reptiles in the local market (if they lived), and a serious devaluation on the reptile side due to the unrealistic expectation of $6-12 reptiles.

Its a sad thing to deal with, but I am trying to build a respect for the reptiles and hopefully regain some of those customers that I can only assume were new to the whole reptile thing in the first place and got a raw deal. It is a hard sell.

In any case, I think folks need to realize both ends of the spectrum exist, breeders trying to make a living and flippers trying to make a living the two are vastly different people.

Now where the heck did this entire thread start? Oh yeah, feeding horn worms to Gekko, yeah...any of the soft bodied worms will be accepted in moth form (your silk worm moth though does not provide nearly the same level of enrichment as the others due to its lack of energetic flight ability).

Maurice Pudlo