Some girls are bigger than others

[ingo]

Hello Ingo V.,

"Adipositas permagna" is only the expression for having very much overweight (in humans, depending on the definition, you call it "a. permagna", when the body-mass-index is over 35 or over 40).

It is not a disease though - Prader willi syndrome is an example for a disease connected with adipositas permagna, but there are some more other possible causes.

 

[stephanie]

We have two dogs and one is in great shape and the other is really fat- and has been for over 5 years. We put her on a diet a few years back and she didn't lose any weight, she just looked depressed all day and stared at her food dish. Finally this year her vet diagnosed her with a hypothyroid problem, gave her drugs, and she's already getting much better. People use it as an excuse all the time for being overweight- and if someone truly is hypothyroid then there isn't anything they can do without getting thyroid meds. Some other symptoms of low thyroid problems are puffy face, depressed state, and inactivity.

 

[edward]

Amphibians are hard wired to take advantage of periods of plentiful food items by feeding as heavily as possible on them. Remember, the food gods do not come by in the wild on a regularly scheduled routine and hand feed them and in the wild, high calorie, easily digested food items are not that plentiful and calories have to be expended to capture the food item.....

Ed

 

[edward]

snip "You should let John know that feeding amphibians with mammalian meat is a sure fire way of making them fat. They can't digest pinkies correctly (it's not a natural food for a salamander) and they end up getting fat. As soon as I saw the photos I immediately thought of pinkies, hence my original question about what John is feeding her. "

Hi John,
I have to disagree with you slightly here.. Amphibians do digest mammalian protiens just fine. The problem with pinks causing obesity is due to them being calorically dense when compared to comparably sized food items (for example a pink has over 6 times the amount of calories as a similar sized cricket). This caloric density is what leads people to overfeed on pinks.

I have seen tigers that fat, that were fed the normal food items. They were just fed to excess. The metabolic caloric requirments are temperature dependent and if kept at a cool temperature and overfed, ambystomids in particular can easily become obese through overfeeding.
The folowing picture is of a A. opacum that has been only fed on crickets twice a week yet is obese...

 

[joseph]

Wow Ed! Could that be a male?

I'm assuming Ambystoma and other terrestrial salamanders are more prone to obesity due to their inactive lifestyle. Not much excercise compared to newts.

While many people say their newts don't like them so far all mine have taken redworms just fine...even chopped ones. I do try to insure they don't secrete lots of that yellow juice though. Maybe less tasty food items could be a way of preventing sals from becoming overweight?

 

[phoebe]

Oh, poor things, they are very lovely creatures though, the tiger and that pink thing u have Ed, but get them on a lead and take a trip down to the park, if the will, lol. They are lovely though.