Can Bearded Dragons Eat Celery
Learn whether bearded dragons can eat celery and how often it should be fed if they can.
Last Updated: December 24th, 2021
By: Steve
Table of Contents
Can bearded dragons eat Celery? Is Celery good for bearded dragons? Yes, bearded dragons can eat Celery on a semi regular basis. We tend to advise against regular feeding of celery purely because it’s not got a great nutritional profile. There are better options for every day feeding.
What Is Celery For Bearded Dragons?
Celery is a fairly fibrous plant with a long stalk and green leaves. It grows around the world usually in marsh-land. Celery is often used in weight loss programmes since it contains mostly water and very few calories. Indeed, until recently it was thought that the body spent more energy chewing and digesting celery than could be obtained from it through digestion.
This has been debunked by experiments at the University of Alabama, which determined that energy is available from celery, although not all that much. The experiment, interestingly, used Bearded Dragons as the test subject. It’s worth pointing out that bearded dragon metabolism is quite different to that of humans, so potentially less energy (or maybe more) might be available to humans.
Celery leaves have a mild peppery taste. For some people, celery contains potentially life threatening allergens which can lead to anaphylactic shock. It’s worth noting that the allergen is not destroyed by cooking.
Can Bearded Dragons Eat Celery?
Bearded dragons can eat celery occasionally. There’s nothing particularly harmful in celery that puts it in to the occasional category but there is relative little nutritional value in it. It does have a semi-reasonable calcium content, but the rest of the celery is mostly water.
It can be a good vegetable to help rehydrate your bearded dragon after a bout of diarrhea or other illness, although too much can cause over-hydration which can lead to electrolyte imbalance complications.
Advantages Of Celery For Bearded Dragons
Disadvantages Of Celery For Bearded Dragons
How Should I Feed Celery To A Bearded Dragon?
Celery can be chopped into reasonably small pieces such as you might do for a human when adding the celery to a soup or salad. The pieces can then be added to the rest of the bearded dragon’s salad dish and left in the vivarium.
The celery will gradually dry out during the day and care should be taken to replace it if it becomes too dehydrated – particularly if you’re using the celery to help rehydrate your bearded dragon. The stalks will generally last longer than the leaves.
Both the stalk and the leaf can be fed to your bearded dragon. The leaves don’t need to be cut into such small pieces as the bearded dragon will tear and chew the leaves easier.
Celery should be dusted with a good calcium supplement as it doesn’t contain a huge amount of calcium.
How Much Celery Should I Feed A Bearded Dragon?
Unless you’re using celery to rehydrate your bearded dragon after a period of dehydration for whatever reason, then celery should be limited to a couple of times a week as too much celery can potentially overhydrate your bearded dragon. When the bearded dragon is overhydrated they will pass fluid instead of the white solid urate and can overload the kidneys and pass excess electrolytes – ironically leading to dehydration.
For this reason we tend to stick to feeding celery a couple of times a week to help with hydration but without overdoing it.
Nutritional Data For Bok Choy For Bearded Dragons
| Nutritional Item | Content |
|---|---|
| Water Content (%) | 95.4 |
| Fat (%) | 0.17 |
| Protein (%) | 0.69% |
| Dietary Fibre (%) | 1.6% |
| Calcium (mg/100g) | 40 (0.040%) |
| Potassium (mg/100g) | 260 (0.26%) |
| Phosphorous (mg/100g) | 24 (0.024%) |
| Vitamin A (ug/100g) | 22 |
| Vitamin C (ug/100g) | 3.1 |
| Oxalates (mg/100g) | Low[3] |
Can I Grow My Own Celery?
Growing your own celery requires a fairly specialised soil type which retains moisture and doesn’t dry out. It’s not particularly hard to grow if the soil is correct. The Royal Horticultural Society gives by far the best advice regarding growing your own celery.
But given that it’s not something we recommend you feed every day, there’s probably not much point unless you’re going to use the celery yourself too.
Summary
So, can bearded dragons eat celery and is celery OK for bearded dragons? The answer is yes, celery can be given to bearded dragons occasionally, up to a couple of times a week. For normal healthy bearded dragons that would be the most often we would recommend. For dehydrated bearded dragons you can feed more often to help them rehydrate – but once rehydrated then we’d revert back to a couple of times a week.
Bok Choy will need dusting with a good calcium powder twice a week just to boost that calcium level up even further though.
Frequency: OCCASIONALLY.
For more information on other vegetables that Bearded Dragons can eat, please see our larger overview post at ‘What Vegetables Can Bearded Dragons Eat?’
References
1: Katherine M. Buddemeyer, Ashley E. Alexander, Stephen M. Secor. Negative calorie foods: An empirical examination of what is fact or fiction, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/586958, March 24 2019.
2: US Department of Agriculture Food Data Service. Fetched on 14th May 2021 from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/169988/nutrients
3: St Joseph’s Healthcare Hamilton. Oxalates In Food. Fetched from https://www.stjoes.ca/patients-visitors/patient-education/patient-education-k-o/pd-9447-oxalate-in-food.pdf on 14th May 2021.