List of Best Foods for Tegus
If you're thinking of buying a tegu or if you already own one, you may wonder, "What can I feed my tegu?" The answer is a balanced, varied diet of prey, meat, fruit, vegetables with appropriate supplements.
We often hear from owners who rely solely on easy (but unvaried!) diets, such as only scrambled eggs or leftover vegetable scraps. While these options will keep your tegu fed, they likely don't provide the valuable variety of nutrients which can lead to your Tegu living a happy and healthy life.
Below you'll find a full alphabetized list of food for tegus from our experience and research online. Looking for a varied diet that comes pre-prepared? Check out this collection of prepared, canned, and dried tegu food that you can use as part of your Tegu's healthy diet.
REMEMBER: Always balance fresh food with prepared foods!
Whole Prey
- Captive-raised insects
- Crayfish
- Chickens (baby)
- Crickets - Flukers Freeze-Dried Grasshoppers
- Earthworms
- Frogs (feeder)
- Gerbil
- Hamster
- Horn-worms
- Lizards (feeder)
- Meal-worms
- Mice
- Pinkie mice
- Quail hatchlings
- Rats
- Roaches - Zoo Med Can O' Cockroaches
- Silk-worms - Zoo Med Can O' Silkworms
- Snails - Zoo Med Can O' Snails
- Super-worms
- Toads (feeder)
- Wax worms
Meat
- Soft-boiled or scrambled eggs
- Raw meats: turkey, lamb, venison, fowl, beef - be sure to add calcium - Zoo Med Reptile Calcium without D3, Zoo Med Reptile Calcium with D3
- Fresh fish filets
- Organ meats: liver, hearts, gizzards
- Seafood: Crab, Scallops, Shrimp
Fruits
- Apples - in moderation
- Bananas - in moderation, peels can be fed if grown organic
- Berries
- Blackberries
- Blueberries
- Raspberries
- Strawberries - in moderation, high in oxalates and giotrogens
- Cantaloupe
- Casaba
- Cherries
- Concord grapes - higher in oxalate
- Dates
- Figs - fresh or dried
- Grapes- Thompson seedless; green and red
- Honeydew
- Kiwi
- Mango
- Melons
- Papaya
- Peaches- high in goitrogens
- Pears- high in oxalates
- Pumpkin
- Tomatoes - high in oxalates
- Watermelon
Veggies
- Acorn squash
- Alfalfa
- Asparagus
- Bell peppers
- Butternut squash
- Chicory greens (Escarole)
- Collard greens
- Dandelion greens
- Endive
- Escarole
- Green beans
- Green peas, snap peas
- Kabocha squash
- Leeks
- Mustard greens
- Okra
- Parsnip
- Prickly pear cactus
- Radish
- Rapini
- Snap peas
- Spaghetti squash
- Turnip greens
- Yellow squash
- Yucca root - cassava- tough, should be shredded
- Zucchini
- In Moderation
- Beets and Beet greens - in moderation, high in oxalates
- Bok choy - in moderation, high in goitrogens
- Parsley- good source of calcium
- Broccoli - in moderation, high in oxalates
- Brussels sprouts- high in goitrogens
- Cabbage- in moderation, high in goitrogens
- Carrots and tops - in moderation, high in oxalates
- Cauliflower - in moderation, high in goitrogens
- Celery- low in nutrition
- Coriander - in moderation, high in oxalates
- Corn - feed rarely or never, low in Ca and high in Phosphorus
- Cucumber - low in nutrition
- Flowering plants like- Nasturtiums, Dahlia or hibiscus, - be careful of pesticides and herbicides
- Lettuces - low in nutrition
- Rutabaga
- Spinach - feed rarely or never, high in oxalates and goitrogens
- Sweet potato - feed rarely
- Swiss chard - feed rarely or never, high in oxalates
Bread
- Cooked pasta or rice
- Whole wheat bread
- Lentils-cooked
Supplements
Prepared Food
List modified from: Tegu Talk: A Community for Tegu Keepers
Other helpful tips about feeding your tegu
Feeding schedule:
Tegus are fast growers with active metabolisms, so regular feeding is important. Juvenal tegus should be fed daily - typically the amount of food that they can eat in about an hour. As they reach adulthood, tegus should be fed small, adequate meals several times a week (every other day or every second day). Decrease feeding during the winter when tegus hibernate. After each meal, clean up all leftover food from the enclosure.
We recommend feeding your tegu with tongs to prevent accidental finger biting!
6 Responses
noah
This was extremely helpful! I’m shifting in-between getting a tegu or a monitor, so I am writing down information and then seeing in the end what the better option will be! I used to have a tortoise so my mom is very very very used to buying strange foods for animals (exotic animal family :)
but anyway, thank you!
Tyler Helble
Reptilinks (www.reptilinks.com) are also a great source for whole prey tegu food. fruits and veggies are ground into the whole prey, providing a balanced meal. They also make a blend for hatchlings.
Pinakin Sabnis
Thanks for sharing the information! I have own store for reptile supplies in Dubai, I have found helpful information for my customers to share. Keep posting such great information.
J
Well Kaz, you will for sure end up killing your monitor if you keep feeding canned at food. The gravy is far too fatty for them. I had a Savannah monitor that was fed canned cat food before I managed to get a hold of him, only to have him for less than a year before he passed. The gravy will cause fatty liver issues, that if they aren’t taken care of with a proper diet, will calcify and eventually killing off your monitor. Very painfully I may add. NOBODY LISTEN TO THAT AND FEED ONLY WHOLE OR FOODS PRODUCED FOR MONITORS. YOU WILL KILL THEM WITH CAT FOOD. Save yourself a huge vet bill and heartache of you killing your animal slowly and just do some research on proper diets.
Kaz Vorpal
The conventional wisdom is that tegus must be fed raw, unprocessed food.
But the conventional wisdom about saltwater tanks used to be that you must have a coral bedding with under-gravel filter.
There’s actually no hard science to the idea.
I’ve raised my Argentine red tegu on canned cat food with sometimes raw, sometimes frozen fruit, and the occasional raw shrimp, and he’s thriving on it. Now the cat food I get him is mainly types with chunks of meat, plus peas, carrots, sometimes rice, potatoes, and greens…stuff that’s silly to feed cats, but okay for actual omnivores. But he also goes over and eats my actual cat’s dry food on occasion, and suffers no apparent harm from that, either.
Similarly, I only feed him what he’s willing to eat. No crazy efforts to force him to eat vegetables he doesn’t like by mashing it with something he likes. In the wild there’s nobody mommying any reptile. If they don’t want a given food, they don’t eat it. And they do just fine.
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BG
July 30, 2020
My gold tegu prefers hard boiled eggs the most, eats them gently right from my hand.