Thoughts on Calcium Powders

[haysebecca]

I'm relatively new to owning a beardie and have some questions about calcium supplements. Are they essential to the beardies diet or can they get enough calcium from the bugs themselves? How often should you use them, every feed? Are there any preferred brands or one to deffinitly ovoid?

 

[Humanmeerkat]

Yes extremely important!!! as is a uv light to prevent mbd. Please google beardie mbd.

 

[Eavlynn]

Feeders don't have a ton of calcium, except for black soldier fly larvae. Dusting with calcium and a good multivitamin is essential to making sure they get everything that they need nutritionally. I prefer the calcium without D3, but I keep both on hand, and mix a 50/50 batch to use in the winter when they can't yet outside for natural sunlight. Multivitamin with beta carotene is important, too. If it doesn't specify that the vitamin A is derived from beta carotene, it's synthetic, which their bodies can't process and can lead to toxicity issues. I like the Flukers products.

For the young babies, they get about 4 calcium dusted roaches and 2 multivitamin dusted roaches with every meal (3x a day). Once they put on some size, I back the dusting off to one meal of the day. And my adult gets roaches every other or every third day. If she was healthy I'd dust every other meal, but she has MBD, so she gets calcium every feeding.

MBD is pretty awful and can cause a good deal of pain, and it can affect them for the rest of their lives. My 2 rescue beardies both have it, and it was devastating. It's been a long road to recovery for my big girl, and I have an even longer road ahead with the new baby. The dust is a must! It's better to exercise too much caution than not enough with these little darlings.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

 

[haysebecca]

Feeders don't have a ton of calcium, except for black soldier fly larvae. Dusting with calcium and a good multivitamin is essential to making sure they get everything that they need nutritionally. I prefer the calcium without D3, but I keep both on hand, and mix a 50/50 batch to use in the winter when they can't yet outside for natural sunlight. Multivitamin with beta carotene is important, too. If it doesn't specify that the vitamin A is derived from beta carotene, it's synthetic, which their bodies can't process and can lead to toxicity issues. I like the Flukers products.

For the young babies, they get about 4 calcium dusted roaches and 2 multivitamin dusted roaches with every meal (3x a day). Once they put on some size, I back the dusting off to one meal of the day. And my adult gets roaches every other or every third day. If she was healthy I'd dust every other meal, but she has MBD, so she gets calcium every feeding.

MBD is pretty awful and can cause a good deal of pain, and it can affect them for the rest of their lives. My 2 rescue beardies both have it, and it was devastating. It's been a long road to recovery for my big girl, and I have an even longer road ahead with the new baby. The dust is a must! It's better to exercise too much caution than not enough with these little darlings.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

Thank you so much! I've been using the Flukers calcium powder, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't giving him too much or too little.

 

[Hdrydr31]

Yes very important.. In the link below several of our comments (not seen on taptalk) we've put together info for new comers, in there we've written a segment on supplements and how often.