Bearded Dragons Can Eat Cucumbers

You may have wondered whether bearded dragons can eat cucumbers? Or if cucumbers For Bearded Dragons are OK? The answer is Yes, bearded dragons can eat cucumbers occasionally. However cucumbers offer almost no nutritional value to bearded dragons except for helping with hydration. Cucumbers also have moderate levels of oxalate content, which isn’t so good for bearded dragons but we’ll go into that later.

So, How Often Can Bearded Dragons Eat Cucumbers?

Bearded dragons certainly can eat cucumber on a semi-regular basis as part of a balanced salad diet. They’re not going to gain a great deal of nutrition from a cucumber (see the nutrition table below) but nevertheless they will gain a good amount of moisture for hydration purposes. Bearded dragons will get most of their water through the foods they eat and as such, if they’re a little dehydrated then adding some cucumbers to their salad will help replenish some of that water.

Cucumbers can be great gutloader vegetable (fruit!) for insects, as this will help keep the insects nice and hydrated and squishy without them being able to drown. In fact, we never have any water for our feeder insects anymore, too many die by drowning. And they never touched Bug-Gel – so just use moisture rich vegetables instead.

Advantages Of Cucumbers For Bearded Dragons

Disadvantages Of Cucumbers For Bearded Dragons

How Should I Feed Cucumbers To A Bearded Dragon?

Cucumber can be fed to bearded dragons as part of a balanced salad diet and can be placed in a dish with other vegetable foods. Be aware that though cucumber will dry out quickly in the heat of the vivarium so it, along with the rest of the salad, should definitely be put as far away from the heat lamps as possible.

Cucumber can be peeled, or not, depending on your willingness and your bearded dragons taste. Then the cucumber can be cut into cross-sectional slices (circles), shredded/grated or cut into longer slices depending on how your bearded dragon prefers it. It’s superbly soft (particularly when the skin is peeled) and unlikely to cause any issues whichever way you do it.

Can Bearded Dragons Eat The Seeds in Cucumber?

You may see other sites tell you that bearded dragons shouldn’t have the seeds in cucumber because they’re a choking hazard, but if they’re cut up with the cucumber slices then they’re very small and soft. We wonder if the other sites we’ve seen have actually looked at a cucumber or are just repeating robot generated content about other types of vegetables where the seeds might actually be dangerous.

Crickets and locusts, even mealworms are more of a choking hazard than cucumber seeds.

Bearded dragons can have cucumber seeds as part of the cucumber slice.

Can Bearded Dragons Have Raw Cucumber?

Is there any other way to have cucumber? Cucumber is great as part of a salad dish. Cooking it seems like a strange idea to us. Yes, bearded dragons can have raw cucumber.

Can I Use Cucumbers to Gutload Insects For Bearded Dragons

Cucumber is an excellent gutloader vegetable for any of the bearded dragon insects and is especially good at keeping the insect itself hydrated without needing any water source or expensive (and often untouched ‘bug-gel’.

We keep our Morioworm feeders hydrated using a few chunks of cucumber in their substrate, although the Morios tend to eat it fairly quickly. Care needs to be taken, particularly if you have lots of Morios and don’t feed them to your dragon all that often (as you probably shouldn’t) because the cucumber will make the substrate moist and can lead to mould growth. It’s therefore best to pop a bit of cucumber into the Morio container in the morning, leave it until afternoon and if there’s any left remove it again.

If the insect substrate gets too damp from the cucumber you’ll need to change it. We use Weetabix crushed and chopped to keep ours in. Since hydrating them using cucumber we lose hardly any of them due to premature death and our bearded dragon enjoys the extra plumpness and alertness of them!

How Much Cucumber Should I Feed A Bearded Dragon?

Given that cucumbers are mostly water, it’s unlikely you’d actually end up overfeeding them to your bearded dragon – but that much water in vegetables isn’t without risk of over-hydrating. Overhydrating will result in runny poos and potentially a reduction in electrolytes if it goes on for too long so if you notice this happening then cut down on the amount of cucumber.

Nutritional Data For Cucumber For Bearded Dragons

Nutritional Item	Content
Water Content (%)	95.2
Fat (%)	0.11
Protein (%)	0.65%
Dietary Fibre (%)	0.5%
Calcium (mg/100g)	16 (0.016%)
Potassium (mg/100g)	147 (0.147%)
Phosphorous (mg/100g)	24 (0.024%)
Vitamin A (ug/100g)	5
Vitamin C (ug/100g)	2.8
Oxalates (mg/100g)	20 (Moderate)

Summary

Bearded dragons can eat cucumbers occasionally as part of a balanced salad diet but do watch out for overhydration features such as runny poops. Cut back on the cucumber if you notice this happening. There’s nothing intrinsically nutritional about a cucumber but it can help sweeten up a salad a little and provide that important hydration.

Cucumbers are also good gutloaders for insects such as morio worms, locusts or crickets.

We’ve marked cucumber as an occasional dietary feature since there’s no harm in it, but keep an eye out on those poops.

Frequency: OCCASIONAL.

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: US Department of Agriculture FoodData Central. Fetched on 6th February 2021 from https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/fdc-app.html#/food-details/1103126/nutrients

2: Oxalate (oxalic acid) content of 750+ foods, with numbers from university and government sources – sourced from https://oxalate.org/ on 15th May 2021.

Featured Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay