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Daniel R Lack

@wildnutripro

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Wildlife nutrition, welfare & conservation
Science-led tools for animal nutrition
@ WildNutri Pro Puggle
Founder: @dan.r.lack
wildnutripro.org
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Reptiles, insects, corals, seagrass and even fungi all have one thing in common: keeping them alive is not the same as helping them thrive. WildNutri Pro includes specialist nutrition and cultivation systems for animals and biological systems that simply cannot be treated like a dog, horse or livestock ration. Think Diamond Pythons, Bearded Dragons, Komodo Dragons, Giant African Millipedes, Honey Bee colonies and other specialist species, alongside Oyster Mushroom cultivation, Seagrass systems, and both Hard and Soft Coral. Their daily requirements can depend on far more than simply “how much food?” For reptiles, temperature, activity, body mass, life stage, feeding frequency, prey composition, calcium and phosphorus balance, vitamin exposure, hydration, UVB access and thermal gradients can all influence nutrition and condition. For insects and other invertebrates, requirements may involve colony or life stage, substrate, moisture, temperature, protein and carbohydrate sources, mineral availability, gut loading and the nutritional quality of the food itself. And then the definition of “nutrition” becomes even broader. Corals depend on the interaction between light, dissolved nutrients, feeding, water chemistry and environmental stability. Seagrasses depend on light, nutrients, substrate conditions, salinity and water quality. Oyster mushrooms require the right substrate composition, moisture, temperature, aeration and cultivation conditions for each stage of growth. That is why WildNutri Pro was designed to adapt to the biology of the organism instead of forcing everything into the same calculator. Different species. Different systems. Different rules. And when published science does not provide a defensible numerical requirement, WildNutri Pro does not pretend that it does. Explore the growing platform at: wildnutripro.org #WildNutriPro #AnimalNutrition #ReptileNutrition #ReptileCare #Invertebrates by @wildnutripro
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2 hours ago
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After a very long time building, testing, changing, breaking, fixing and learning, I can finally start properly showing you WildNutri Pro and Puggle. These projects came from a simple idea: animals are incredibly different, and their nutrition and care should reflect that. WildNutri Pro brings together species nutrition, ingredients, macro and micronutrients, life stages, body condition, enrichment, feeding ecology, red flags, ration building and the science behind what we know, while clearly showing where real data gaps still exist. From pets and livestock to zoo animals, reptiles, birds, fish, marine species and specialist wildlife, the goal is to help people understand their animals more deeply and make better-informed care decisions. And then there’s Puggle. Puggle takes that same world of animals and makes it interactive, educational and fun, letting you care for different species, move through life stages, manage feeding and welfare, and learn how different animals really are along the way. This first reel is only a glimpse of what’s been built. wildnutripro.org wildnutripropuggle.com The web platforms are live now, with the iOS apps on the way. If you work with animals, study them, keep them, breed them, rescue them, teach about them, or just never stopped being fascinated by them, I hope you’ll come along for the journey. This has been a huge labour of love, and I’m very excited to finally start sharing it. #WildNutriPro #Puggle #AnimalNutrition #WildlifeNutrition #AnimalWelfare @natgeo @animalplanet @natgeoanimals @resharkorg @btn_ujung_kulon @lionguardians_ @projectsurvivalcathaven @zambi_wildlife_retreat @mamalittlewolf @womenforwolves @wildnutripro by @wildnutripro
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12 hours ago
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Reindeer nutrition is far more complex than simply “grass, lichen and browse.” Across the year, a reindeer’s nutritional landscape can change dramatically. Energy demand, protein intake, fibre, minerals, vitamins, water balance and body reserves all shift with season, temperature, forage availability, growth, pregnancy, lactation, antler development and environmental conditions. In summer, reindeer may have access to nutrient-rich grasses, sedges, herbs, leaves, shrubs and fungi. In winter, the nutritional picture changes. Lichens become increasingly important, browse availability changes, snow and ice can restrict access to forage, and the animal must balance intake against the energetic cost of thermoregulation, movement and digging through snow. Then there are the micronutrients. Calcium. Phosphorus. Magnesium. Sodium. Potassium. Copper. Zinc. Selenium. Manganese. Vitamins and other essential nutrients all interact with the broader ration, while excessive supplementation can be just as important to recognise as deficiency. Nutrition also cannot be separated from behaviour. Browse height, feeding location, food presentation, seasonal variety, opportunities to forage and search, herd dynamics and enrichment all influence how an animal actually interacts with its diet. That is exactly why WildNutri Pro was built. Not simply to ask: “What does a reindeer eat?” But: What does this individual require? At this life stage? In this season? Under these environmental conditions? And how does the ration actually compare with those requirements? WildNutri Pro brings species biology, captive nutrition, wild feeding ecology, enrichment, body condition, ingredient data and ration formulation together in one system. Explore WildNutri Pro: 🌐 wildnutripro.org Follow WildNutri Pro on Instagram and TikTok for more advanced animal nutrition, wildlife husbandry and species deep dives. From reindeer to big cats, marine mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, corals, seagrasses and beyond. Animal nutrition changes when you start looking at the whole animal. #animalnutrition #animalwelfare #reindeer #arctic #wildnutripro @animalplanet @natgeo @natgeoanimals by @wildnutripro
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18 hours ago
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One of the first animals I ever worked with over 20 years ago was a weedy seadragon. Two decades later I sat down to write its nutritional requirements into a piece of software, and found I could not. Not a gap in my notes. A gap in the published record. Here is what we do know, and why it matters. A seadragon has no stomach. No teeth either. It feeds by suction, the snout works like a pipette, and the strike is one of the fastest feeding movements in any fish, over in a few thousandths of a second. It also has a very narrow window on prey size. A newly hatched seadragon can only take food within a specific size class. Offer it prey a fraction of a millimetre too large and it will not, and physically cannot, eat. You can lose an entire cohort of fry in a tank that is visibly full of food. They starve surrounded by it. That is the part people find hard to believe. Feeding is not a question of quantity. It is a question of whether the animal in front of you can physically use what you have put in the water. And the same logic runs outward. Mysid production depends on kelp and seagrass. Protecting a seadragon means protecting the meadow that manufactures its food, which is not how we usually write conservation plans. I have written a longer piece on this, across eight species. Link in the comments. #conservation #marinebiology #animalwelfare #wildnutripro #seadragon @natgeo @natgeoanimals @animalplanet @mazuri by @wildnutripro
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a day ago
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Marine nutrition gets strange very quickly. A seahorse has no true stomach, so food passes rapidly through its digestive system. Many corals gain much of their energy from symbiotic algae, but they can also capture plankton and dissolved organic material. Seagrasses are true flowering plants that returned to the ocean millions of years ago and now support everything from juvenile fish to dugongs and turtles. A shark’s internal chemistry is completely different again, while marine mammals can be affected by changes in prey fat, storage, vitamin content and even how fish are thawed. That is why marine nutrition is never just about what an animal eats. Temperature, salinity, light, flow, water chemistry, prey type, life stage, body condition and nutrient balance can all change the picture. WildNutri Pro and Puggle are being built to explore that entire spectrum, from hard and soft corals, seagrass and crustaceans to fish, elasmobranchs, reptiles, penguins and marine mammals. Because a coral, a shark, a crab and an orca may share the same ocean, but nutritionally they may as well belong to different worlds. www.wildnutripro.org www.wildnutripropuggle.com @animalnutrition #animalnutrition #animalwelfare #marinebiology #zoology #ocean @reshark @wildnutripro by @wildnutripro
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a day ago
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Animal nutrition is never just about what goes into a bowl. In zoological care, nutrition, behaviour, enrichment, physiology and welfare are inseparable. A diet can meet theoretical nutrient requirements and still fail an animal if it ignores how that species is designed to forage, hunt, browse, graze, manipulate, select and consume food. A carnivore tearing into a carcass is feeding and enriching itself at the same time. A giraffe reaching for suspended browse is exercising natural feeding posture, encouraging movement and increasing feeding time. A primate searching, processing and working for food is engaging cognitive, behavioural and nutritional systems simultaneously. Aquatic species, reptiles, birds, hoofstock, carnivores, primates and domestic animals all present completely different challenges. Life stage, body condition, environment, season, reproductive status, activity and ingredient composition can change what appropriate nutrition looks like again. That is why understanding zoological nutrition requires more than simply asking, “What does this animal eat?” We need to ask how much, how often, in what form, with what nutrients, under what conditions and through what behaviours. WildNutri Pro is being built to bring those questions together. Species nutrition data, daily requirements, macro and micronutrients, body condition, feeding calculations, ingredient analysis, life stages, husbandry context and practical nutritional decision support in one expanding platform. WildNutri Pro wildnutripro.org WildNutri Pro Puggle wildnutripropuggle.com Web platforms available, with dedicated apps on the way as WildNutri Pro continues to roll out. More zoological nutrition, wildlife conservation and husbandry content: TikTok: D.R.L.WildConservstion #WildNutriPro #WildNutriProPuggle #AnimalNutrition #ZooNutrition #animalwelfare by @wildnutripro
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2 days ago
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A pangolin’s tongue is not anchored in its mouth. It runs back through the body and attaches near the pelvis. It has no teeth at all. Instead it carries a muscular, grinding stomach that works with sand and grit the animal swallows deliberately. Essentially a gizzard. Estimates of intake run to tens of millions of insects per animal, per year. And they are selective about it, particular ant and termite species, not whatever is available. Now the part that keeps me up. Pangolins are the most trafficked wild mammals on earth. Animals are confiscated from that trade in significant numbers, and every confiscation is reported as a victory. Then a substantial proportion of them die in the rescue centres that receive them. The cause is largely nutritional. You cannot simply provide “insects.” Substitute diets built on commercial larvae and milk powders routinely produce gastric ulceration, diarrhoea and death. The centres that have improved survival did it the hard way, sourcing live ants and termites at scale, or reverse-engineering gruels from chemical analysis of real wild prey. Enormous resource goes into interdiction. Comparatively little goes into the forty-eight hours after a crate is opened. So we are, at real expense, successfully rescuing animals into a second death. Rehabilitation nutrition is not a supporting service to enforcement. For a confiscated pangolin it is the entire difference between a rescue and a delayed loss. It should be funded that way. #wildnutripro @pangolincrf Www.wildnutripro.org Www.wildnutripropuggle.com #wildlifeconservation #pangolin #wildlifetrade by @wildnutripro
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4 days ago
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Carnivore nutrition in captivity is far more complex than simply “feeding meat.” A complete carnivore diet must consider the nutritional composition of the whole prey animal, not just skeletal muscle. In the wild, many carnivores consume muscle, organs, connective tissue, bone, skin and sometimes gastrointestinal contents, creating a very different nutrient profile from a simple meat-based ration. Calcium and phosphorus balance is critical because boneless meat is naturally phosphorus-rich and calcium-poor. Taurine is especially important in obligate carnivores such as felids, while liver and other organs provide concentrated sources of nutrients including preformed vitamin A. Fat quality matters too. Essential fatty acids influence energy supply, skin and coat health, inflammation, reproduction and overall physiological function. Nutrition also extends beyond chemistry. Carcass feeding, bone, hide, feeding frequency, fasting intervals and food presentation can influence oral health, activity budgets and natural feeding behaviour. Most importantly, energy and nutrient requirements are individual. Age, body condition, reproductive state, activity, environment and health can all alter what an animal actually needs. Modern zoo nutrition should therefore ask: What nutrients is this individual animal receiving, in what quantities, from which ingredients, and does that ration reflect its biology? That is the level of detail we are building into WildNutri Pro. Adaptive Wildlife Nutrition #WildNutriPro #WildlifeNutrition #ZooNutrition #CarnivoreNutrition #AnimalNutrition ZooScience AnimalWelfare by @wildnutripro
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6 days ago
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The first animal I ever worked with was a weedy seadragon. We can keep one alive. What we largely cannot do is state its requirements. How much protein. Which fatty acids, in what ratio. What happens over a lifetime when its prey arrives frozen rather than live. That last one matters more than it sounds. Frozen crustaceans and fish carry an enzyme that destroys thiamine. Feed them long enough without correcting for it and you get neurological collapse. The same enzyme, in the same prey, has been implicated in mass mortality of wild fish populations. So the captive animal and the wild one are failing for the same reason. We just notice it faster in the tank. When people hear “zoo nutritionist” they picture someone deciding how much goes in a bowl. The actual work is closer to forensic accounting. You establish what an animal needs when nobody has ever measured it, working from proxy species, from wild diet studies, from what went wrong last time. Over the past month I have written about eight of them. The seadragon. The pangolin. The western lowland gorilla. The Arctic fox. The gharial. The musk ox. The scimitar horned oryx. The Arctic char. Different continents, different failures, one pattern underneath. Every requirement we write down is also a description of what that animal needs from its habitat. A seagrass meadow. A termite mound. A krill swarm. Protecting a species and protecting its food supply are not two conservation problems. They are one problem, and we tend to fund only the first. None of this gets solved by one discipline standing alone. Keepers, nutritionists, field teams, universities, aquaculture, and the people who fund all of it are working on the same problem from different ends. Full article linked below. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/animal-nutrition-conservation-what-needs-eat-map-world-dan-lack—p5pqf?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&utm_campaign=share_via #conservation #wildlife #wildnutripro #animalnutrition #marineconservation by @wildnutripro
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8 days ago
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Welcome to WildNutri Pro After years working with animals, keepers, conservation programmes and wildlife projects around the world, I wanted to build something that brings wildlife nutrition, animal welfare and practical species knowledge together in one place. WildNutri Pro is that platform. Built for keepers, animal professionals, students, educators, zoos, sanctuaries and anyone serious about improving the way we understand and care for animals. Inside WildNutri Pro we’re building: Detailed species profiles Wild and managed-care nutrition Species-specific nutrition calculators Body Condition Scoring tools Nutritional red flags and health considerations Enrichment programmes Ingredients and ration formulation tools Resources for students and education Conservation-focused species knowledge And alongside it comes WildNutri Pro Puggle, our more interactive, accessible side of the project, designed to make animal nutrition and welfare engaging for the next generation too. This is only the beginning. There are a lot of animals coming. WildNutri Pro www.wildnutripro.org WildNutri Pro Puggle www.wildnutripropuggle.com Follow the founder: @dan.r.lack TikTok: D.R.L.WildConservation #WildNutriPro #WildlifeNutrition #AnimalNutrition #ZooNutrition #animalwelfare by @wildnutripro
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13 days ago
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