alanmin4304

A double dose is going to give less chance of resistant bacteria remaining.

They sell them frozen overseas for animals we can't keep here like snakes but here I think you have to breed your own. Not hard but smelly compared to rats.

Much of the reptile requirements are similar, particularly in relation to metabolic bone disease.

There are easier ways to spell diarrhoea but you could get a sore wrist.

I have glued poly to wood with water based no more nails and it worked well--don't know about poly to poly but should be OK. You just need to stay away from solvents that will disolve the poly.

My apologies---I misread it. In fact he is right 2.4 to 1 Ca to P There is still other stuff that could be a problem but I don't know when it would become a problem

Mustard doesn't look too good realy. The Ca/P ratio is the wrong way round and there is other not so good stuff in there as well (although how much is a problem I don't know).

I generally spray the veg with vitamins and dust the insects with calcium (when required) Mine are a bit moody about eating and will eat what they want when they want it. Some days eat no salad, other days eat no insects. I try to get them to eat dead locusts while still fresh and sometimes they do or don't. The problem is they will always go for live insects hence, I think, the tendancy to overfeed them.

And they can all be dusted with calcium

Two sites I have had refered to me by kind people down this way are: http://www.beautifuldragons.503xtreme.c ... ition.html http://www.repticzone.com/articles/Ca-P_ratios.html They give an idea of the content of some foods and may be useful.

I understand that crickets are better food value than locusts but I have heard of people having trouble feeding crickets. Their first instinct is to hide and then they can come out at night and bite your pet. Locusts don't bite to my knowledge. For that reason I would only feed crickets one at a time and watch them being eaten. Locusts can be placed in the cage and eaten when convenient so this would be better for animals that may feed at different times to when you are able to give them food. Mealworms are high in phosphorus and wax moth larvae are also and are pretty fat. Pinky mice are also pretty rich and should be fed sparingly. Foods high in oxalates are calcium blockers.

Rare steak---it is just raw in the middle.

Hang in there for a few days before you go sticky.

My female is called Queenie but she gets treated like a lizard.

The best way is to feed food high in calcium and low in phosphate. This problem is relativly common in turtles fed a diet of cat food and other junk. There are vegatables out there that are high in calcium and low in blockers. Dandelion leaves are available and cheap. In the wild there will be long periods when not much food is available and this is why they brumate. As said previously, if you only feed good fresh vegetables they will eat it when they are hungry enough. Better than killing with kindness

I imported goldfish years ago and paid for 7 inspections over the 6 weeks of initial quarantine.

The application of the rules has changed. Years ago if you had a disease in imported fish you treated it. Now you are not allowed to treat it until Maf tells you what the disease is and what to treat it with and by then the fish are probably dead. If they think there is a disease they take samples and send them off to be tested (this can cost thousands of dollars) then they destroy the fish or tell you what to treat with and by then the fish are dead. If there is no disease it still costs thousands of dollars. This is part of the reason why there are less and less people importing.

Metabolic bone disease seems to be a regular problem not only with beardies but a lot of reptiles. It seems simple to give adequate calcium and enough UV to help with absorption. There are other complications. People feed too much protein in the form of insects, and meat and it contains a lot of protein and often fat. Protein is a double helix of phosphates with amino acids hanging off it so this provides a lot of phoshate. I understand the ratio should be 2 of calcium to 1 of phosphate. There are other foods out there that tend to block the absorption of calcium as well and this all contributes to the problem. You don't need to force your beardie to eat its veg before it gets pudding but if there is only veg it will get hungry after a while. Reptiles in nature are not hand fed and any animal as big as us is likely to want to eat it, so hand feeding in my view is not a good thing. We may be killing our reptiles by trying to be kind. We all have our own views but these are mine.

Sorry, I double posted below.

A bit of beer helps too. In or out of the patties.

Could the female have been pregnant when you got it?

Not legally.

Have you used flourish excel?

The application for approval to import may well be free but the information they will require to consider the application is very unlikely to be. If it was easy---lots of people would be doing it (including me)

Trust me I have done it. You will need to quarantine them (for 6 weeks at a guess). You will need to establish a quarantine facility at great expense and heartache or arrange for them to be quarantined at an existing facility.