watertiger21
New Member
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2015
- Messages
- 6
Hey all! My little 3-inch baby leopard isn't eating as well as I think he should. He hasn't lost weight yet, but he's started picking at his food. I need advice!!!
So far I've been feeding him daily with turnip greens, collard greens, radicchio, endive, and little bits of re-hydrated timothy grass. Calcium and vitamin supplements are sprinkled on the food every couple of feedings. He gets soaked daily in lukewarm water. The temperature on the cool side of his enclosure is 80 degrees F and the warm side is 90 degrees F (I measure temps with an infrared temp laser gun). Humidity is kept high and the cage is an enclosed chamber. Substrate is eco-earth with a big pile of moist moss in the back of the enclosure, which he likes to hide under. UVB provided is 5.0 (for "forest" animals). The heat bulb is a purple bulb, NOT red. His water dish is one of those shallow ceramic dishes everyone typically uses.
The big green bucket thing seen on the right of the photo is a bucket with a hole cut in it for a house/hide and a 2nd bucket on top of it that's full of water and has a bubbling air stone in it (this keeps the humidity high). The white dish you see in the middle of the cage is his soaking tub (he was having his bath at the time the photo was taken) but it is usually not in there unless he's soaking.
Improvements I'm planning on doing:
1. I'm going to drive to town on Tuesday to get some dandelion greens and will try feeding them to him.
2. I'm going to try leaving the UVB bulb OFF for a day or two and see what happens. His appetite slowed down after I started using the UVB, so maybe the light is bothering him.
3. Tomorrow I will change the purple heat bulb and get a ceramic heat emitter instead.
Any other suggestions? Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it's my impression that hatchlings should have hearty appetites. He only eats a bite or two and then wanders away, and he used to eat more at a time than that.
Thanks!
So far I've been feeding him daily with turnip greens, collard greens, radicchio, endive, and little bits of re-hydrated timothy grass. Calcium and vitamin supplements are sprinkled on the food every couple of feedings. He gets soaked daily in lukewarm water. The temperature on the cool side of his enclosure is 80 degrees F and the warm side is 90 degrees F (I measure temps with an infrared temp laser gun). Humidity is kept high and the cage is an enclosed chamber. Substrate is eco-earth with a big pile of moist moss in the back of the enclosure, which he likes to hide under. UVB provided is 5.0 (for "forest" animals). The heat bulb is a purple bulb, NOT red. His water dish is one of those shallow ceramic dishes everyone typically uses.
The big green bucket thing seen on the right of the photo is a bucket with a hole cut in it for a house/hide and a 2nd bucket on top of it that's full of water and has a bubbling air stone in it (this keeps the humidity high). The white dish you see in the middle of the cage is his soaking tub (he was having his bath at the time the photo was taken) but it is usually not in there unless he's soaking.
Improvements I'm planning on doing:
1. I'm going to drive to town on Tuesday to get some dandelion greens and will try feeding them to him.
2. I'm going to try leaving the UVB bulb OFF for a day or two and see what happens. His appetite slowed down after I started using the UVB, so maybe the light is bothering him.
3. Tomorrow I will change the purple heat bulb and get a ceramic heat emitter instead.
Any other suggestions? Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it's my impression that hatchlings should have hearty appetites. He only eats a bite or two and then wanders away, and he used to eat more at a time than that.
Thanks!
