Sink Salad

In yesterday's post, I made a brief mention of sink salad, and thought I'd unpack that a little.  In our reptile house, we basically had three dietary groups - the bug eaters, the meat and fish eaters, and the salad eaters.  While the first two groups were broken down further on the basis of size (fruit flies vs crickets, pinkies vs mice vs rats, etc), the salad eaters all got our standard salad.  For purposes of ease, we'd make it up in one large batch, mixed up in, you guessed it, a (clean, empty) sink.

Several greens would be chopped up as the base - we usually went for a mix of lettuce (romaine, red leaf, green leaf - never iceberg) and darker greens, such as collards.  Then, the veggies, mostly of the root variety - carrot, yellow squash, zucchini.  Sometimes there would be added seasonal vegetables as well.  Everything was chopped roughly and mixed up, then doled out into individual serving sizes.

The salad was largely the same, but the eaters (and the sizes of their mouths) were not.  For the big kahunas, like the Galapagos tortoises and the blue iguanas, you barely needed to do anything else - they were big enough to eat it as it was.  For the tiny guys, such as the shield-tailed agamas, you had to take their share and dice it fine, as you'd expect for a lizard with a head the size of your thumbnail.  The smaller the portion, the more important it also was to make sure they got a representative sample of the salad - not just a chunk of carrot.

Some species would get some fruit, like apple or banana, mixed in.  Others wouldn't.  Fruit is very watery and for species that aren't used to it, it can cause diarrhea.  And you couldn't put too much in either - otherwise the animals would scarf the yummy fruit portion down and ignore the part that was, you know, healthy.  Other animals might get some meal worms, or even some diced rodent, sprinkled across the dish.  Then, a dusting of vitamin and mineral powder over the mix, served out in trays or bowls.  When we'd put the bowls in enclosures with multiple animals, we'd often pick the critters up and put them at the edge of the tray.  That way, everyone knew it was feeding time and no one missed out.  Then, we'd wait a second or two to make sure everyone actually was eating.  Not showing interest in food might just mean the animal wasn't hungry - or it might be a sign that something was wrong.