Hi Hespie
Goodness you’ve dredged up an old post!
The problem with mealworms is that they have more phosphorous than calcium which can lead to calcium being leached from the bones.
Calci-worms are usually the opposite and have more calcium than phosphorous.
For me, the jury is still out as to how good they are for hedgehogs otherwise. Also there is a problem that when these things become more popular, people will try to produce them more cheaply and feed them bad diets. That apparently happened with mealworms and some of them (which had been fed on low quality diets) apparently had an even worse ratio of calcium to phosphorous than others did.
I have read part of a study of calci-worms which were fed on various qualities of food and those that were fed rubbish (literally) had lower calcium levels than those fed on better diets. So if you ever were going to feed calci-worms it might be worth checking what the levels were.
As things stood at the time of that report, the calci-worms had higher levels of calcium than mealworms did. However, I do not know whether it may be discovered at some time in the future if, for instance, that too much calcium may not be good, for some reason (or too much calcium in relation to phosphorous – as I understand it both are necesary, so that an imbalance in the other direction may not be good either – that is something I do not know enough about to be able to comment at the moment). Or that there may be something else about calci-worms which are not ideal for hogs. So, personally, until I have heard some more information from an expert on nutrition of hedgehogs, I wouldn’t recommend that they were fed in any more than small amounts – more of a garnish to other food.
I would, however, advise anyone against feedng mealworms to hedgehogs as it seems there is quite a lot of evidence that they are harmful to hogs.
The following is some advice from Vale Wildlife at the end of which is a table showing the calcium to phosphorous ratios of various foods. Unfortunately calci-worms are not yet mentioned.
http://www.valewildlife.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Feeding-wild-hedgehogs.pdf
