Appetite

[IMJ]

Hello - I have an Argentine B&W that I got back in January. Everything is going great and she seems pretty healthy, however she doesn't seem to have the appetite I was expecting. It's actually died down over the last 6 weeks or so. I would expect with the the warmer weather it should pick up. She has gone through quite a growth spurt since I got her. She weighed just over a pound when I get her and she is now at 5.5 pounds, so she has almost quintupled in size in only 3 months or so. Could the rapid growth contribute to a diminished appetite? I offer her a variety of foods but just to give you an idea, she will only eat maybe 2 cubes of ground turkey and a fuzzy rat per day if I'm lucky.... It's probably closer to eating that every other day. I have tried offering her small meals one day and larger meals the next and that seems to help. She sheds fine (she seems to shed every week btw) and she passes small stool every 2 or 3 days. Thoughts?

 

[Derek Doel]

i was having the same issue and turned out that the temp wasnt warm enough for him. once i added some more heat lamps the appetite increased alot.

 

[IMJ]

I was actually concerned Temps might be too high. I have 124 directly under the MVB, 81 on the far side of the "cool" end, and the ambient air temp in the middle is 90.

Its an 8x4 enclosure, 160w MVB on the hot side and a 100w infrared on the cool.

 

[Roadkill]

It's not so much the temperatures of the enclosure that are important, but the temperature the tegu can behaviourally regulate at. It's good to go for certain enclosure temperatures, but you really don't know if your tegu is utilizing them unless you measure your tegu.

That, and considering that tegus are reptiles, they have a slow metabolism and digestive process: they don't need to eat every day.