Once you have chosen what type of lizard you are planning to own as your pet, the next most important thing you should figure out is its food or diet. This will require a lot of research on your part if you want your pet to live its maximum life span.
Every species of lizards would have its own preference in terms of diet. There are lizards whose diets would consists purely of insects, there are those that will eat small mammals, birds, fish together with the insects, there are vegetarian lizards as well and of course, there are lizards that will eat everything. To be certain that your pet lizard should get all the nutrients that it needs, you have to be certain that you know by heart what type of food they eat, and if you have enough sources for those. If you do not prepare yourself in knowing the feeding habits of your pet lizard, it may die sooner than you expect.
Most lizards, when they are still hatchlings, between two to four months old, will eat a lot of insects. This insect diet will be comprised mostly of crickets, cockroaches and flies. You should mix them up a bit with meal worms, waxworms, king worms and earthworms when they get older. If you’re pet becomes an adult, you could include mice in their diet if they are the type that could digest mice.
If you own a herbivore or omnivore lizard pet, a variety of leafy vegetables would best comprise their diet. Mixing and matching the kinds would be good for your pet. By feeding it different kinds of vegetables, it could absorb all the necessary nutrients for its growth. The usual vegetables that breeders would feed their pets would be red and yellow cabbages, Chinese cabbages, sprouts, broccoli, beans, peaches, bananas and others.
Omnivores don’t require as much vegetables as herbivores. 80% of its diet must be constituted with meat and insects which are rich sources of proteins while 20% should be made up of fruits and vegetables.
It would be difficult to provide your pet lizards all the nutrients that they should find in the wild especially for the carnivores and omnivores since they may have preys there that cannot be found in the regular pet shops. To address this, what you could do, and what you must do to ensure that your pets would get all the required nutrients would be to give them multi vitamins, mineral tablets, and to sprinkle their food with calcium tablets. These dietary supplements are supposed to be available in pet stores.
Since different species of lizards will have varying dietary requirements, it’s best to research on your pet’s diet first. There are books and articles available in bookstores with complete and comprehensive information on specific species of pet lizards. Try to get one of these to have a detailed information and thorough instructions on feeding your specific pet lizard.
Providing the right care for your pet lizard is difficult if you don’t know what you are doing. It’s even worse if you already know how to care for one type of lizard and assume that the same treatment would apply to all types of lizards. Different species will require different care. Their requirements to live a normal and comfortable life as captive animals will depend on how much you can simulate their new living quarters just like their natural habitat.