What does a common iguana eat?

Answer 1

Iguanas are vegetarians. They should ideally be fed:

• Greens such as collard greens, mustard greens, turnip greens and dandelion greens
• Squash such as butternut squash, acorn squash, yellow squash, zucchini, and a few other kinds of squash. Squash should be cut up and shredded into very small pieces.
• Green beans, peas, parsnip, asparagus, Okra, onions, mushrooms, bell peppers, sweet potato, and carrots. All of these foods should be cut up into very small pieces and/or shredded.
• Fruits such as figs, blackberries, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, mango, melon (cantelope, honeydew, watermelon), papaya, bananas, and apples. Fruits should only be a small amount of your iguana's food, so don't feed it too many fruits. Most of these fruits can be peeled, cored and cut into very small pieces or shredded.
• Cooked rice or pasta. This can be a good treat or something you can give your iguana every once in a while.

Do NOT feed your iguana lettuce. Lettuce is not only exetremely nutrient poor, it is also highly addictive for iguanas. If you continuously feed an iguana lettuce it will develop an addiction and will not eat anything else. This may kill your iguana but will more likely result in it suffering from symptoms of malnourishment. If your iguana has become addicted to lettuce, the best thing to do for it is to feed it Romane lettuce as opposed to the common Iceberg variety. Romane lettuce, while still far from the ideal iguana food, contains trace amounts of most of the nutrients an iguana needs and hould keep your iguana from becoming malnourished.

If your iguana is young it may also eat insects, small vertebrates, and/or eggs. This is perfectly fine; Iguanas are omnivorous, but they tend to prefer plants and they do not actually need to eat meat (most of the older ones will refuse to unless they are starving).

An important note: Iguanas require natural sunlight to digest their food. Without the UV rays produced in the sun they cannot digest anything and will starve to death no matter what you feed them.