Can this be healthy?

[philip]

yeah , sorry ed, having read laurens ingredient list, it seems everything in the pellets is nutritionally sound. the problem i have is i doubt any of my collection would take them because even though i know they have a good sense of smell, they seem far more motivated by the movement of prey items

 

[philip]

al. we use trout pellets for fishing bait here and to soften and make it sink, you can mix some pellets with a small amount of water, let them absorb it and knead it into a semi stiff paste, which if you were feeding amphibs on it, could be molded into any shape or size

 

[lauren]

Ed - I was referring to Karen's original comment about pea powder where she called fish meal a filler, so no harm, no foul.

Al - my axolotls have the opposite problem. They will ignore the rangen pellets altogether, and eat the HBH while it's still sinking. I think that putting the rangen pellets in the freezer might have dried them out too much - but they come in too large a quantity to have them out with the little bottles of HBH. Maybe the squid and krill have some effect as well - either as an attraction or deterrent depending on the animal.

 

[karen]

I did not mean to give any misinformation regarding my previous posts. I had looked up sources of newt food on as many sites as I could find, including this one, and most (if not all) did not find pellets as excellent sources of food. If this is incorrect, I am indeed sorry- I wouldn't want any newt enthusiasts to deprive their newts of anything beneficial. Perhaps the article link that I posted earlier could be updated/editted since it does put pellets pretty close to the bottom in terms of nutritional benefits. I would think anyone who read it (including myself) would stay away from pellets as a result of thinking they were not good for their newts.

 

[al]

No offense taken. I'm glad this was brought up. That article was written a while back and I don't know if it was updated recently. I like to hear other thoughts and experiences when it comes to caudates. I have heard much over the last 10 years and am always learning something or revising my thinking.
It used to be said a while back that meal worms were bad, because they can eat through your caudate's stomach!! It started out from a personal experience, when a keeper saw his salamander dead and an meal worm crawling on it (or out of it?). If you look at the digestive system of salamanders with all the enzymes, this would be far fetched (even though chitin is not thoroughly digested). I remember not using meal worms for a long time. Some keepers would continue using them, but would crush their heads prior to feeding!!!

This was to disable their mouths so they would not do harm.

I personally like using different forms of live food, since I find culturing them almost as interesting. I'm still glad there are non-live food choices, when things gets scarce.

 

[edward]

The field of animal and (in particular) herp nutrition is really just starting as most of the information is extrapolated from other sources (nutritional analysis are after all nutritional analysis) and in some respects the internet has helped and in some respect hurt the dissemination of the information.
Mealworms are known to predate on or scavenge on animals if there is insufficient food or water available. Now if you have fed your animal mealworms and not been very careful, mealworms may have escaped into the substrate and have been living there with insufficient food sources so they either attack the animal in the cage with them or it dies and it is scavenged. So when the dead animal is picked up and the mealworm falls away or crawls out of the carcass, people automatically assume that the mealworm burrowed out of the body. This interpretation has been around as long as I can remember and is routinely reinforced by new and old anecdotal observations that make the rounds...

One of the items to keep in mind with the pellets (trout chow, Rangen and "newt bite") is that these are high in oils which can go rancid over time so the palatability maybe related to how long ago the container was opened..

Ed

 

[jamie]

Thank you all for the advice. I think that I will keep feeding my newts the "bites", and save the worms and stuff for treats.