Mealworms...

[SuckerLove86]

(Hope this is in the right place)

So I found out today that mealworms are beetles. How? I opened my plastic tub of uneaten giant mealworms.

See, my frogs were eating crickets for a while, then lost their taste for crickets and decided they enjoyed mealworms, so I got some of them, then the frogs stopped eating mealworms so I went back to crickets. I basically forgot about the meal worms. Well, I ran out of crickets today so I was gonna see if there were any mealworms still alive. Yep. There were. But not in mealworm form.

I don't suppose the firebelly toads will eat the beetles will they? The beetles aren't very big at all...

 

[SirMinion]

Yes, I think it's very likely that they will, but the beetles have a much lower nutritional value than the lavae (worms) and have thicker chitin (shell).

I feed mealworms to my puffers, parrot cichlids, & gudgeon and they love them but one puffer (Cookie) prefers the mealworms in the pupae stage and the gudgeon loves the beetles.

Mealworms. Something for everyone!

 

[elgecko]

I used to raise my own mealworms when I was breeding Leopard Geckos.
Buy mealworms once, and you never have to again. Thanks to the beetles.
I used some kind of chicken feed with extra calcium for the culture bedding. This way my female Leopard Geckos would get more calcium during breeding time to form the eggs since the worms ate the chicken feed. Add something with some moisture in there once a week for the mealworms, like a split grape, small amount of lettuce, etc.
I had around 10 cultures going.