I recently bought a dozen trough feeders from Stromberg's in the hopes that it would help prevent my Seramas from flicking out their food and wasting it. I'm talking big-time waste here! Unfortunately, that didn't quite work out.

For one thing, they were designed to be wall mounted, which I knew, but I couldn't figure out how to get their hooks to work with my cages. I wound up just using some pipe cleaners and tying them to the cage wall. So, instead of being off the ground, they had to sit on the ground which led to the babies (youngsters, now) scratching their bedding into the trough.

That wasn't a problem when I put them in the adult cages that have wire floors, for obvious reasons…

But as you can see in the picture, there is a lot of food sitting in the tray after just one day. The trough is too shallow and fills too high so it's still easy for them to flick it out. Erik made a quick modification with some cardstock to deepen the trough and not have it fill so high.

I put a paper towel in the tray below to see if they still flick out the food. I like the hopper so that I can fill it up once per day; with the previous cups I was filling them once in the morning and once at night. So hopefully this will work and there won't be so much wasted food. My next plan of action is to change their feed to a pelleted one…I don't think they really like this current feed…