The Best Food for a Bearded Dragon
Feeding a bearded dragon the right food is important for their well being. There is no shortcut to feeding your precious pet. You need to provide it with the correct diet so that they are both healthy and happy. You should give your bearded dragon a diet that includes live food for them to benefit from the full nutritional content, such as protein. This article discusses why you should feed your bearded dragon live foods.
The suitable food for bearded dragons
Because a bearded dragon is considered as an omnivore, it means it can feed on a wide range of fruits, insects, and vegetables. This variety of edible foods makes these lizards fun to feed. You can give your bearded dragon mealworms, crickets, pepper, sweet potato, king worms, fruits like mango and melon, and many more.
Here is the deal, you should make sure that your bearded dragon eats a diet that replicates what they would feed in the wild. But as it gets older, you should reduce the amount of meat like that you feed it because they don’t do as regular exercise as they do in the wild. Therefore, feeding them on too much meat can cause obesity problems. Remember that crickets, earthworms, king worms, locusts, etc are considered meat.
A bearded dragon is like any other pet that might consume some food that can be considered harmful. Therefore, you should take responsibility by making sure that they are not fed such food in the first place. You must not give your bearded dragon food such as seafood and poisonous wild plants.
Food appropriate with their age
Depending on the age of your bearded dragon, it’s recommended that you should feed them at least once a day. Young bearded dragons need to be fed more insects than vegetables. Besides, they should eat more often than the older ones and you can feed them at least three times a day.
The best part is that young bearded dragons are easy to feed. All you need is to leave greens and vegetables in their enclosure and they will eat them when they want to. Apart from this, you can add insects every 10 minutes of feeding time. Baby bearded dragons can feed about 60 insects each day but you should clear out the insects that they don’t eat after every feeding period.
Some bearded dragon owners advise that juvenile bearded dragons need to feed about 50% of insects and 50% of vegetables, plants, and fruits. You can also get some recommendations on how to feed your dragon at Bearded Dragon Guru. On the other hand, adult bearded dragons can feed fewer insects of between 25 and 30%. Hence, you should consider giving your adult bearded dragon insects for at least one a day while the rest of the food should be vegetables, plants, and fruits.
As explained earlier, adult bearded dragons don’t require a lot of insects to avoid obesity problems. In the wild, they can eat more meat because they do plenty of exercises. The best meat that bearded dragons like a lot are perhaps crickets. Therefore, make sure that you give them as many crickets if they are available.