Can Bearded Dragons Eat Earthworms? 4 Benefits | Full Guide

Insects make a significant component of your bearded dragon’s diet. But as the bearded dragon owner, you must ensure what kind of food you need to include in your diet. The question you have to ask is can bearded dragons eat earthworms? Bearded dragons are omnivorous, so they can eat any food you give them. Earthworms are safe to include in your bearded dragons as they provide an excellent calcium source. But keep in mind to feed them only once each week because they contain low nutritional value.

Can Bearded Dragons Eat Earthworms?

Bearded dragons can consume earthworms, red worms, nightcrawlers, and other worms. First, bearded dragons can consume just any insect, nonetheless of toxicity. So if your bearded dragon accidentally eats earthworms, it is safe. However, it would be adequate to give earthworms occasionally to your bearded dragon. 

Remember that your bearded dragons should not consume baited or red worms from your garden as they may bring parasites. Store-bought earthworms are safe for your bearded dragons. You should feed earthworms in moderation to bearded dragons as they have a high-fat content that may result in obesity, particularly those who do not exercise.

How Often Can Bearded Dragons Eat Earthworms?

You should include earthworms in your bearded dragon’s diet once a week, and you shouldn’t overfeed earthworms to your bearded dragon. Usually, juvenile bearded dragons can eat about ten worms, while adult dragons eat about twenty worms.

4 Benefits of Earthworms for Bearded Dragons

1: Protein Boosts Growth and Maintenance

Bearded dragons’ diet should be the same as wild dragons, which provides them with a significant number of foods as a source of protein. You can also include reasonable and readily available foods like earthworms. These foods contain many proteins that adult and juvenile bearded dragons need for growth and maintenance, and you can offer them to young dragons more than adults to promote their active growth stage.

2: Vitamins and Minerals Aids in Tissue Repairing

Apart from proteins, earthworms include vitamins and minerals like iron, amino acids, manganese, and copper, enabling the bearded dragon’s food breakdown and absorption and aiding body tissue repairs. They are an excellent calcium source, the most significant nutritional necessity for bearded dragons. This element helps in the bearded dragon’s skeletal development and enables it to prevent bone diseases such as MBD (Metabolic Bone Disease).

3: Good Source of Hydration

Bearded dragons require plenty of water. Nonetheless, because they can not comfortably drink water from the pots, you can give them through feeding them food with increased water content. Earthworms are an outstanding option because they hold a lot of water. A giant earthworm’s weight can take up to ninety-five percent of water, which is excellent for hydration.

4: Healthy Fats Helps in Adjusting Body Temperature

Earthworms are high-fat foods that can function as energy stocks for bearded dragons. When bearded dragons consume fats, they help adjust their body temperature and bearded dragons’ all-around hormone output. Nonetheless, bearded dragons need minimal quantities of fats. Excess calories and fats in earthworms can result in obesity and other weight-related disorders in your pet.

3 Risks of Feeding Earthworms to Bearded Dragons

1: Chemical Contamination

Although earthworms alone are not deadly to bearded dragons, wild earthworms could be infected. These worms crawl across plants and grounds with pesticides, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides, and other fatal chemicals. Feeding such organisms to bearded dragons may intoxicate and even result in your dragon’s death.

2: Wild Earthworms Harbor Parasites

Parasites such as tinier worms and organisms can be set in an outdoor worm’s body. You will be transporting these fatal organisms to your bearded dragon if you deliver them to these earthworms and damage or kill your pet in the procedure.

3: Low Nutritional Value

Relying on the species, earthworms comprise seventy to ninety percent water. That is much more than the thick-bodied bugs your dragon has modified to eat and may result in stomach upsets.

How to Prepare Earthworms for Your Bearded Dragons?

Wash Thoroughly

After planting many earthworms, rinse them in plenty of water. Keep this thing in mind whether the earthworms are bought from pet stores or collected from your breed. It will let you wash off chemical contamination and mud on the earthworm’s skin.

Add a Calcium Supplement

Although earthworms have calcium, it is in the least amount, and you may need to supplement before feeding your bearded dragon. You only require to drizzle calcium powder on the live food, and you can take a salt or sugar shaker to coat the earthworms and boost their nutritional significance. Ingesting adequate calcium helps increase your bearded dragon’s bone health.

Feeding Earthworms to Juvenile Bearded Dragons 

Before feeding earthworms to a juvenile dragon, you might want to contemplate chopping them into smaller chunks. It assures that they would not be a choking danger and will make it simpler for the juvenile to absorb them. When your bearded dragon is younger, its diet should consist mainly of vegetables and fruits. Usually, they will only require around 30% of their diet to be insects.

Feeding Earthworms to Adult Bearded Dragons

You would not require cutting the earthworm up for an adult bearded dragon. When provided as part of a meal, you can blend the earthworms in the vegetables and fruits like cucumber, dandelion greens, etc, so the bearded dragon is required to chase them out. Remember that these are not a staple part of the earthworm food. Instead, feed it to them irregularly as a treat. Using earthworms for meals periodically can be an excellent way to flavor their diet.

Where to Get Earthworms for Your Bearded Dragon?

Buy from Bait Shops

You can also purchase earthworms from bait stores. These shops harvest earthworms to utilize as fishing baits. For this reason, the bait worms don’t contain pollutants such as pesticides that could threaten the fish. Nonetheless, ensure that these worms are not colored, as bait shops occasionally dye earthworms to make them more noticeable in water and simplify trapping. This dye could damage your bearded dragon. 

Purchase from Pet Stores

An excellent way to get your worms is to buy them from a trusted pet store. The rationale is that pet stores breed earthworms as a pet diet. You can purchase earthworms in several sizes varying from 1/4 inch to 1 inch from the shop. It is important to remember that the younger your bearded dragon, the smaller the quantity of the worm.

Breed Your Earthworms

It will be good if you breed and harvest the earthworms at your residence. This idea is an outstanding option if you want to chop on your pet’s feeding expenditures. Home worm output is accessible, and you only require a bin set-up for breeding. And you can feed your bearded dragon your compost trash, such as lettuce, potato peels, corn, moldy bread, fruit peels, or spaghetti, and help preserve the climate.

Order Online 

Various online shops deal in vermiculture. These dealers breed earthworms and sell them to pet stores at wholesale rates. Thus, you can get earthworms immediately from them by specifying them online. Nonetheless, you should search for business documentation and infer whether breeders and dealers are registered breeders before taking. 

Conclusion

Can bearded dragons eat earthworms? While earthworms are an excellent source of protein for your bearded dragon. You should not feed them with earthworms daily; doing so may result in obesity, particularly in adult bearded dragons. Also, you should grow your worms or buy worms from an excellent source to avert transporting parasites from wild-collected earthworms to your bearded dragon. Even though earthworms are accessible and a reasonable food option, they have small nutritional content to aid a bearded dragon. Besides, a large earthworm consumption can pose a health danger and lead to weight-related problems if you do not control the consumption.

Plus, most bearded dragons find earthworms’ texture unpalatable, and the reason being is that they have a mucus lining on them. Thus, it would be adequate to give your bearded dragon foods that provide substantial nutritional value and those they will relish more than earthworms. 

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