ROACHES!

Okay, you all know the annoying ad with the dog following the Beggin Strips bag all over yelling "Bacon, Bacon, Bacon!"?
Well it is too fun to watch my nearly year old girl Savannah do this. She has a ball over chasing them and mashing them to tenderize them and eating them. Bugs is her only live food and she just is thrilled to eat those hissers. Now I gotta wait for the weather to warm up and get some other more reproductive ones in for her. Too fun to see a 3# lizard tripod begging for more. The only thing she enjoys more is her bath.

You SURE she only weighs three pounds? lol.

why dont u give your savanah small live mice since she likes to eat live food?

She really loves her food in all forms. She is just more fun with roaches as there is no sympathy for the eatee and the eater is throwing herself all over after the roaches. She does get mice, rat pups, any of the snake leftovers...washed and rewarmed.

why dont u give your savanah small live mice since she likes to eat live food?

I just stumbled onto this thread reccently, so sorry about the seriously delayed response.

The above quote, despite being misspelled and devoid of any use of the shift key, is really indicative of a serious problem when it comes to varanid diets.

Savannah monitors, in their natural environment, throughout their entire life...

EAT MOSTLY INVERTEBRET PREY

Insects, worms, arachnids and all the lovely little exoskeleton covered wiggly things make up about 75% or greater of a sav's diet, based on stomach samples collected from various locations at different times of the year to ensure more uniform study results. This goes for hatchlings and this goes for four and five foot monsters.

Suggesting a high rodent diet is just asking for long term health problems... tell me Mister Can't-find-the-shift-key, why would you give an animal that eats massive amounts of invertebret prey items and then other ectothermic vertebrets and then endothermic vertebrets on rare occasions as they become avaliable... a diet consisting heavily of rodents?

You do realize that there are nutritional differences between a mouse and an enormous cockroach, right?

And that savs have evolved to digest invertebret prey for the most part, with far less nutritional benefit for fatty, hairy, bone filled rodents?

Why would you even suggest such a thing?

Sure, rodents are fine as an occasional dietary addition, but should never make up more than five, maybe seven percent of the diet by mass for a healthy Sav. The stated practice of "when the snakes won't take it" is the perfect addition of rodents... stick with the bugs, the sav will be a lot healthier.

Thanks Seamus. Yeah, I know I aim for more bugs than anything. Even though keeping up with a nearly 3 ft Sav with bugs is hard. She gets what I can give her and then mice to fill. That and I have used the 'turkey diet' for her occasionally. So many have this total mindset that rodents is the best thing and the whole 'whole prey' thing and it is manic on the KS monitor forum with it.
But I for one do aim for bugs. At least she doesn't get fat on them like she did on mice when my roaches chilled out on breeding for me.
Sonya

It can be tough keeping enough insects of a suitable size around to keep them on the ideal diet constantly, but as long as it's most the time, it's alright...

Just because others may wander by and because I want to spell it out a bit more clearly for my new buddy there who wants to probe tegus and feed savs nothing but mice...

Different monitors from different areas with different physical adaptations will consume different prey items. Savs have relatively blunt heads and fairly small teeth for a varanid, relative to skull size. The majority of the prey they encounter is invertebrets, many of which are quite a bit larger than the pet store crickets you probably have avaliable...

There are of course seasonal adaptations to the diet, during certain times of the year, certain prey items will become more common but the majority is always inverts... And they are opportunistic feeders, if they run into a rodent hole that they can dig up before the rodent escapes, they'll quite happily chow on as many as they can catch...

This does not change the fact that the diet of wild individuals, the diet that they have evolved to consume and utilize the nutrients of is, even for the largest individuals, about 75% (give or take a few percent depending on how lucky they got reccently of course) inverts... Insects, Spiders, Scorpions, Millipedes, Centipedes, Worms and so on... A further 15% or more is usually other ectothermic vertebrets... frogs, snakes, small lizards on really rare occasions a fish (Don't ever use feeder goldfish though, very bad nutritionally)... Then slightly randomized items, such as herp and the odd bird egg and finally endothermic vertebret prey should consititute a very small amount of the diet (Around 5-7%, again, give or take a small amount) for a healthy animal.

Unhealthy/Underweight animals are a completely separate matter, pinky paste is a great base diet until they start to put some muscle tone and fat reserves back on, but it's far too easy to overfeed rodents to these animals and cause serious long term degenerative health problems.

I ended up having a sav dumped on me when living in Boston, this was probably three or four years ago... It was being fed mice, several a day in fact and was kept in a twenty long tank...

It was the shape of the tank, ribs splayed out, legs locked in, head permanantly cocked to the size, tail bent around back towards the head, even when removed from the twenty gallon enclosure... could barely move due to the bone deformities and the weight problem (This thing was FAT, sitting on a couch because the arms of the chair are to close together while talking to richard simmons burried in a piano case knock down the wall of the house FAT) it had, in addition to the obvious problems, near complete liver and kidney failure, died very shortly after it was put into my possession...

Point being, some monitors do great on a heavy rodent diet, savannah monitors are not one of them.