Here we are with our first installment of Sunday Supplemental. This is a piece we’ll run once in a while where we go direct to the manufacturer of the supplement and ask the questions we as herpetoculturists should know. This was brought about by our Feeding the Feeder pieces we’ve run recently where one of our Tribe was mentioned by name. Not just mentioned, but she was touted by a feeder provider who’s been around almost sixty years! Thanks so much to Marcy from MS2 Enterprises for kicking this off with us.
Sunday Supplemental with MS2 Enterprises
Why should we Gut Load?
Gut loading is essential as most live feeders have a high phosphorus level. This blocks calcium absorption. As many of us have seen, a reptile with metabolic bone disease is probably one of the most horrible sights to see, painful rubbery bones.
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I look at feeder nutrition on two levels.
One is every day diet. Two is just prior to feeding the feeders.
Providing a high quality every day food is critical to good feeder health and ultimately reptile health. For example, a daily feed of chicken mash might lead to a build-up of toxic mold spores for your reptiles. Chicken mash is made from feed corn, the levels of mold spores allowed in feed corn is much higher than in food grade corn. One of the reasons I use no chicken mash is because a dear friend lost many geckos because a feeder company used chicken mash that had toxic levels built up in them. Every day nutrition, and ultimately health is as important as just before feeding.
Second level is prior to feeding to your reptile. I often hear people suggesting to use carrots or potatoes to gut load. I offer my feeders a mix of my own MS2 Premium Insect Chow and one of the following spaghetti squash, collard greens, or cactus pads, with the occasional carrot thrown in for diversity. I use all organic fresh vegetables when gut loading, this part is for hydration just as much the extra calcium. You can purchase water crystals with calcium in it, but my brain automatically goes to a food source that hydrates with more calcium in it as being a better option vs. a polymer.
Why did you start making your brand?
I started making MS2 Premium Insect Chow after a rather comical incident. I had just started raising dubia and was given some chow in a colony start and figured I’d use that. Well—maybe I was paranoid, maybe I wasn’t. But I could swear I saw a mite. I read that it could come from some of the foods. So after convincing my husband I needed to spend hundreds of dollars on cockroaches I was in sheer panic. I did some online research and saw pictures of some poor roaches covered in mites. This could NOT happen to my colony. What to do, What to do? At this point in time I was petrified to even touch a dubia. But I convinced my fabulous husband to wash my entire colony and dry them with me and put them into a new tub—shiny and fresh! So several hours later each dubia down to the tiniest nymphs were washed and hand dried. My fear of them was slightly less than it was before. I was NOT using that same food ever again, in fact it went straight to the trash and thus started my journey.
After lengthy research and by the second batch I nailed the current formula, which produced the dubia stampede that kicked off MS2 Premium Insect Chow!
What specific nutritional elements are available in your brand?
Although we have not had a formal nutritional analysis done on our chow it is in the works for either 2014 or early 2015. Although I can say that each ingredient was chosen for specific nutritional benefit. After reading an article on animal proteins causing gout, I chose to use strictly vegetable sources of protein and researched all the various levels of nutrition in those elements as well. There nutritional elements found in MS2 chow are Calcium naturally, no added supplementation. I do not add extra calcium for the very reason I do not know what reptiles people are feeding and do not want to make calcium choices for them. It also has protein, carbohydrates, fat, and a host of vitamins including K, A, and a natural source of Vitamin D (not a dairy product) among others. The majority of the ingredients selected for our MS2 Premium Insect Chow are organic or high-grade human quality foods. Whenever possible I have selected organic. Having a nutritional analysis is surely a goal in the coming year including moisture, ash content and Ca:Ph ratio.
Is there any specific preparation needed to offer this to the feeders?
There is no special preparation needed to use this for your feeders.
How is your gut load best offered?
One simply opens the bags, pours the MS2 Premium Insect chow into the dish and stand back! Wait for them to come running. For those who have dubia it is rather entertaining to watch as they will often storm the chow dishes with the lights on, lid of the tub off instead of scurrying away!
What’s the shelf life of your gut load?
Not long as the bugs eat it fast! Actually it stores rather well in the refrigerator or freezer. I have customers store bulk quantities in the freezer for over 6 months with no change in quality. I do recommend that any unused portion of the chow be either refrigerated or if purchased large quantities that it be frozen as I do not add any preservatives to my chow (other than what might be ingredients themselves).
In one sentence sum up for our readers what makes your brand the brand to use?
MS2 Premium Insect Chow amazes me to this day; it has such rave reviews and excellent testimony from so many well-known individuals who see better reptile health, better hatchling growth, better colony production for dubia and even decreased cricket mortality rate when using this as a gut load.