Selecting Food for Tiger Salamanders

Video Transcript

"Now feeding your Tiger Salamanders you have a lot of different options. In the wild they generally prey on small invertebrates and that is the easiest thing to feed them in captivity as well. Now you have a lot of choices. You can use crickets, which are generally available at any pet store. Um they are fairly inexpensive. Pretty easy to breed. The only downside to breeding a lot of crickets is that it does get quite smelly. You have to clean their enclosure a lot. But they make excellent parts of the tiger salamander's diet. What you can do too for these animals, the prey animals, is gut load them too. Make sure you feed them a lot of healthy things, romaine lettuce, apples, a lot of different fruits and vegetables. Stuff that is healthy for them. So that if you have healthier crickets, healthier prey animals, you'll have healthier animals that eat them. You can also use meal worms, in this case these are super worms. Don't use a lot of these. If you feed your tiger salamander meal worms just give them one every now and then, or get one that has just shed its exoskeleton. They are usually whiter. Their bodies are a lot softer. Meal worms have a lot of kietin in their exoskeleton, which isn't easily digested, by a lot of animals. So if feed tiger salamander too many meal worms in one sitting, they can actually get impacted inside the salamander and the salamander will actually die from the impaction. So if you feed them meal worms, which are fine every now and then. Usually when I feed my salamanders meal worm, I'll very gently tear the meal worm's skin, just crack it open a little bit so it's a little bit easier to digest. The digestive acids can get inside the meal worm and digest it easier. "