Feeder nutritional values

I was wandering around the forums and came upon a debate on the nutritional values of mealworms. Curious, I went to see if there was anything definitive and located a PDF that seems like it might be a good resource. Of course, it may have been posted while I was splashing around in the Watering Hole, but just in case, I'm posting a link for those who may be interested. Now, I think they had other insectivores in mind when creating the handbook, but the analysis data should still be useful, I'd think. What's that? I should have used the search function to see if this has been posted before? Search function? We don't need no steenkin' search function!

http://nagonline.net/801/feeding-captive-insectivorous-animals-nutritional-aspects-insects-food/

There are a few sites that have good discussions and some even have charts comparing the nutritional properties of several feeders in addition to the great four (crickets, meal worms, super worms, roaches).

Here's one with a chart when you scroll down:
http://www.moonvalleyreptiles.com/crested-geckos/diet-nutrition/feeder-insects

There are others, but I didn't want to pick one off a roach site, because I figure they're biased.

Nutritional values are almost meaningless, since we don't know the nutritional requirements of tarantulas.

freedumbdclxvi said:

Nutritional values are almost meaningless, since we don't know the nutritional requirements of tarantulas.

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Good point - that. Still interesting to some of us though. Perhaps the more obsessive or experimentally minded among us can see how these values correlate with their observations? I suppose it's unlikely, since most people settle on a small range of feeders, if they range at all.

freedumbdclxvi said:

Nutritional values are almost meaningless, since we don't know the nutritional requirements of tarantulas.

Click to expand...

+1. As a palm collector, I've learned that the nutritional requirements of plants vary a lot, depending on what's in, and not in, the soils they're from. They adapt accordingly to live without a minimum of some things, and an abundance of others. Some grow with little fertilizer, others are very dependent on it, especially certain minor elements. For example, phosphorus, a major element of fertilizer (the middle number) is scarce in parts of Australia, and it can easily be lethal to certain plants, unless the concentration is very low. In other countries, some plants have high phosphorus needs, because it's common in their native soils.

It's also going to vary with spiders, as their prey is eating some of those same plants, which are going to have varying amounts of certain vitamins and minerals. We don't know enough about the hundreds of species of tarantulas, their prey, and their habitats, to be getting too carried away with bumping up nutrition. We would just as easily make things worse. As with just about everything else, there's few 'rules' that apply across-the-board with tarantulas. They're spread out in far too many habitats and climates to generalize.