# cricket food



## LittleDip (May 20, 2007)

I found this on dr. Foster's website- http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/p ... atid=18441

It says " Single solution cubes offer crickets food, water, and vitamins! " so does this mean I do not have to provide water, or potatoes? just a few cubs? :shock:


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

In theory... yes that's all you need! Isn't that awesome?!

Riiiiiiiiight. My experience with it... it's another example of marketing for herp products along the same lines as "freeze dried flies" for herps. A lot of herp marketing has gone from what actually works to what we can get people to buy (don't like feeding live bugs? Feed freeze dried ones and put them on a vibrating bowl! Just like nature... wait...). I'm not saying they will drop dead (super high calcium gut loading food will kill crickets tho) but that I've had much more success with dark leafy romaine lettuce, sweet potatoes, maybe some dog kibble, and a cricket waterer than working with crickets raised on those cubes (which, btw, adults still need another water source beyond the cubes!!), plus I get more out of the veggies for the price than I do the cubes.

"The result makes your feeder crickets a complete food for your pet."

That makes me wince. It's kinda like saying... this works so well, don't bother using any other nutrition projects. IMO - the food that the cricket is eating won't change it's nutritional value (beyond some minor gut loading) like dusting the crickets will... and I also don't like that phrase because it's a complete food for which pet? I've got a few pets... they all have different nutritional needs :?


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## RedEyeTroyFrog (Jan 25, 2008)

ok kero you seem to be the person to talk to about crickets, so with saying that i went to the link that you offered in a different thread...the one about the aqua foam. I was just wondering is this the same way your setup is. What are disposable salad containers? this confused me... could i just use some plastic containers with enough size to hold the foam, food, and egg trays? 

Speaking on terms of the gut-loading, does this really matter if you are dusting them?? Could you just keep romaine lettuce, orange slices, potatoes etc. in there to keep the crickets alive and then dust them before feeding them? or would you need to keep kibble in there as well? , sorry i have so many questions, im just getting really interested in culturing crickets. Especially since i just got some Terribs.

i feed my adult red eye tree frogs 1/2 inch crickets, how long would it take for the pinheads to reach 1/2" Is it worth the time to keep them alive rather than make a run to petsmart? your advise would be greatly appreciated, thanks


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

It's not exactly how my set up is, no... I tend to not have substrate fungus issues so I haven't tried the foam. I got permission to post the article because it seemed to make a couple of the steps with crickets easier so you don't have to worry about the specific substrate and such. 

Disposable salad containers are the plastic containers you can get from the grocery store next to the salad bar... any plastic container of the appropriate size should work, I use gladware. These containers are used only when incubating the eggs. You don't want the food and water sources in direct contact with the egg laying substrate (in this case the block of foam) as you want as little contamination with other things as possible to reduce fungus growth. I don't know what you mean by egg tray in this case? The food can be put directly in the tank, doesn't need to be in a bowl or anything (putting it in a bowl can actually make it harder for the crix to get to it).

The gut loading is debatable, I personally feel it's more important to have nice fat healthy crickets and use the dusts appropriately. The gut loading is only force feeding them certain foods a few hours before they are fed out so that it will be in their digestive tracts and thus eaten by the predator. There is a huge variety of what you can feed them. I use a staple of dark leafy romaine lettuce and sweet potatoes, and supplement with other veggies and fruit as I have them. I keep dog kibble in with the older crickets so they get some more protein in their diet which they seem to need. 

Getting to 1/2" depends on how warm and well you take care of them. I personally find breeding crickets only handy when you need true pinheads, or you really are just going through 10s of thousands of crickets of just about every size and ordering in bulk is just getting $$. For terribilis and RETFs just as pets - not breeding them - I'd say just keep buying from the pet store, and maybe move up to bulk crickets.


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## RedEyeTroyFrog (Jan 25, 2008)

i appreciate it thank you


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## Roadrunner (Mar 6, 2004)

Gutloading w/ the appropriate foods is important. Do you think just leafy green(water and some minerals) and all carb diets are going to produce a nutritionally significany cricket? Garbage in = garbage out. We already use processed sugar and potatoe for ff`s. A human is not going to make a pretty baby on potatoes sugar and yeast and leafy greens( bad analogy but you can see where I`m going). You want HEALTHY frogs feed them crickets gutloaded w/ everything you can find in the house, greens, carrots, Hi quality organic dogfood powdered, oranges, apples, bananna, squash, zucchini, bell peppers, cherries, strawberries etc.
These frogs in the wild get bugs eating every type of plant and fruit available in the rainforest. Tons of different alkaloids and fatty acids, proteins etc. To think these 4 foods fed to their food items creates a "healthy" frog is wrong. That`s like saying americans live on a good diet, you can survive on american fast foods but won`t live a long healthy life. Have you ever tried to feed just ff`s to darts growing them up. Sometimes they get stunted or have other health issues even w/ supplements because most of them are crap. Just because they make it under those circumstances doesn`t mean it`s right. offer the crickets as big of a pesticide/chemical free diet as you can and switch it up throughout the year. If your going to do it you might as well do it best you can.
The floral foam is unneeded also. Any mold/fungus issues result from leaving the brooder box in w/ the crickets too long or having too many crickets laying in too small an area. you want the crickets to get into the substrate( coco peat wetted and wrung out) and lay their eggs and get the hell out, no males hangin around messing up the place. You don`t want the substrate to be a place for them to sit and drink etc. If they do mold you tap the container upside down(only works for 12 or 16 oz deli`s or something similar) and place the cake in the holding tank for the juvis. The fungul mycelium actually bonds the coco peat together as a cake and you can see the eggs all over the sides when you tap it out. The balloon looking ones will hatch while the dessicated ones are no good. Best to get unwinged as they are sometimes bred before they are sent out and have few viable eggs left, not always and I know my supplier doeesnt breed theirs before sending them out. 
Crumple up paper towel and put some paper towel wetted over in the corner. Cover most of the tank top as they need hi humidity when shedding, they dessicate real easy that small.


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Good info Aaron.

So................how many cups of coffee have you had so far this morning


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## Roadrunner (Mar 6, 2004)

Just going to get my 2nd. :lol:
I`m starting to repeat myself alot huh?
Stefan will be here soon and I`m getting out of the house today! This won`t go on all day, I promise! :lol:


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

I definately agree that people need to get more effort into getting healthier crickets by feeding them better... not the crappy cubes or other BS. I use the lettuce/yam as a staple but I also am trying to cook a lot and my crickets see the benefits of it... they are my veggie/fruit composters (living alone means I always have to buy more than I can eat :? my buggies benefit). *BUT* - I don't call a healthy fed cricket a gut loaded one... that term has been generalized beyond it's original meaning to imply anything fed to a feeder insect. The term is literal... loading the gut (digestive tract) with foods that the insect normally would not have to try and change the overall nutritional content of the feeder insect for the predator (such as higher calcium). The predator gets by default what is in the digestive tract too. Gut load diets are different from regular diets... gut loaded diets should only fed fed a few hours before they are fed out so their digestive tract is full of it when fed out. Many of the gut loading diets are calcium rich and will actually kill the crickets so you only feed it to the crickets that will be eaten within a few hours. I think it's really important to make the distinction between the diets and not use the terms so interchangably... gut loading diets are not healthy diets, and you should be feeding healthy diets to get healthy crickets before you gut load them to feed out.

The floral foam is only one way of doing it, and I only recomend the article due to the ease of getting the water to substrate ratio right. The molding issues have a lot more to do with the time in the breeder tank and the incubation, but the floral foam is just a way to simplify that one step. There are tons of different substrates that different people have different successes with. Everyone just needs to experiment with some different ways and find what works for them.


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## Roadrunner (Mar 6, 2004)

Ahh yes, the gutload definition. I never even heard of the calcium thing till ed and here recently. I always took it to mean diet as I never tried to change specifically calcium with it but all vits and minerals. I never really gutloaded just provided such a variety of food that a frog eating 20 crickets never got the same nutritional value twice, similar to the plethora of insects and mites etc, found in a rainforest and the diverse #`s of things they eat.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

frogfarm said:


> Ahh yes, the gutload definition. I never even heard of the calcium thing till ed and here recently. I always took it to mean diet as I never tried to change specifically calcium with it but all vits and minerals. I never really gutloaded just provided such a variety of food that a frog eating 20 crickets never got the same nutritional value twice, similar to the plethora of insects and mites etc, found in a rainforest and the diverse #`s of things they eat.



Why do I always feel drawn into the gut loading issues... .

The official definition has always been a diet intended to adjust the calcium/phosphorus ratio in the feeder insects however the hobby took the ball and ran with it in thier own fashion. 

Oddly enough gut loading diets is one of the areas where the herp hobby sees a lot "voodoo" practices. There is some value to feeding the crickets different items but you need to understand what the nutritional content of those items means. For example, people use the phrase dark leafy greens but this description contains food items that can bind or inhibit calcium uptake (oxalate containing greens), and/or can contain goitrogenic chemicals (such as plants in the brassicacia family), to name two off the top of my head which can cause metabolic disruptions. These are a lesser risk in human diets as we tend to cook these or consume them in limited quantities. 

One of the common items I see is that people feed the crickets sweet potatos or yams (typically not true yams but a different sweet potato (at least in the USA) to increase vitamin A levels in the food. This does not supply more vitamin A as retinol but more beta carotene which if needed can be converted to retinol or retinoic acid (some species have issues with this) but beta carotene is supplied at fairly high levels in virtually all supplements (some also include retinol) so the addition of sweet pototoes to supply more vitamin A is of some questionable value.. 
One of the possible items that I don't see discussed too much for feeding crickets is spirulina... or organic poultry mashes. 

While it is possible for some supplements to have issues, this can be due to a number of problems including but not limited to shelf life and treatment in transit (if it sits in a delivery truck in 90 plus degree weather it may suffer degredation... If there is concern about the quality then there is the possibility of doing what people did in the days before commercially available supplements which is to use suitable human grade supplements, there are risks to this approach as people can use vitamin D2 and do not have to be supplied with D3. 

With respect to Aaron's comment about with the ff media being sugar and potatoes.. if you restricted the diet to only this then there would be issues with the ffs (they wouldn't live) but you have to remember that this is not the only food source in the media. There are also yeasts which are converting the sugars and starches to protiens, vitamins and fatty acids, bacteria which are supplying other amino acids etc and fungi... Now this still supplies a deficient food source (in my opinion) as it lacks sufficient calcium, carotenoids etc most of which can be easily rectified using a dusting regimen. However this doesn't mean that some animals due to other issues may not survive as well or do as well on this regimen but you have to take other items into the equation at this point as cofactors. Shyness, competition, ability to forage, capture food etc all begin to play a role at this point and any one or combination can reduce the fitness and size of an animal (leading to stunted animals).. Unless one can totally nail it down with a confirmed test, you can't rule the other factors out...) 

Some comments,

Ed


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Ed,

Thanks for all the information.

Do you hatch out your own pinheads? If so what do you feed them?

THANKS.


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## LittleDip (May 20, 2007)

So now I know that everything I’ve done is not the correct way of ‘breeding/housing’ healthy crickets and from what I am reading a good diet for them is green leafy lettuce, yams, potatoes, etc. 

What do you feed pinheads?


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

Ed, you feed drawn into them because you are one of the few people that actually knows enough about nutrition for both the bugs and the predator to actually comment on how it all works...

Gary... there are numorous threads, including some recently, that talk about raising the pinheads. There are also numorous articles online on how to do it. Here is one method.

Gary/LittleDip, You feed pinheads the same diet as adults except for two things... hard crunchy stuff is too hard for their week little mouths to chew yet, and not anything really wet like some fruits... they will stick to it and die, and they do that on the cricket waterers too :? 

They are omnivores... so there is a ton of stuff you can feed. You can stick with a couple base veggies and a protien source (I've heard dog food, dog biscuits, Ed mentioned chicken egg laying mash which I want to try). I'm haphazard with what I give mine because beyond the staples, they get my extras.

Ed, my experiences with spirulina in the past had an increase in the fine powder they give off that I'm very allergic to... but that could also be because it was either in powder or flake form. I wonder if mixing it into the mash would get them to ingest it without the extra allergens?


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

Thanks Corey.

I have been keeping up with the other threads. I was just curious what Ed was feeding as well.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

gary1218 said:


> Thanks Corey.
> 
> I have been keeping up with the other threads. I was just curious what Ed was feeding as well.



I have been hatching pinheads at work lately as some rearing techniques with vents has been causing a small population boom. At work we use a finely powdered mash type food the ingredients of which I would have to look up (but it is not made to adjust the calcium phosphorus content) and oranges for the water supply. 

Basically any well balanced finely ground grain type of meal (like some good organic chicken mashes (I would not use layer mash as it has an increased calcium content) will work fine as the particles are small enough for the little crickets. If you have access to your own way to finely grind the food then you can also make your own from organic dry dog or cat foods. Simply grind the food until it is very fine. Often people provide the greens to add water and don't bother checking to see what the other possible effects on the diet may be. 
One of the main concerns is to make sure that there is sufficient water for the pinheads or you will see significant mortality of the crickets. 

Corey, there could have been a number of differnet items that could have caused the increase of allergies with the spirulina.. such as an increase in mites living in the cricket frass as well as small particulate cricket frass or other allergens.. maybe you are also allergic to digested spirulina... 

Ed


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## gary1218 (Dec 31, 2005)

THANKS.


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## LittleDip (May 20, 2007)

KeroKero- 

so with pinheads in your article- you feed them sweet potato yams, lettuce and orange slices this is their 'water source" correct? and all should be moist?


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## KeroKero (Jun 13, 2004)

They eat a huge variety of foods... they eat primarily veggies/fruit with a protien source (organic dog/cat food and chicken mass has been recomended by Ed, ground into a really fine powder the babies should be able to eat it). Any of the fresh veggies/fruits can be water sources if fresh enough, Ed recomended oranges... just beware that some fruits are super watery and the pinheads might stick to them. I managed to raise them find on just lettuce and sweet potatoes as long as they were fresh.


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## Roadrunner (Mar 6, 2004)

Ed, as you know I have nothing but observation to go on. I didn`t realize the yeast converted it down to those different components. Maybe just the mix of calcium every feeding w/ ff`s, the adundance of springs I feed and the possible presence of oxalic acid and such in greens fed crickets just "evens out". NOt to mention, as brought up at the last GNYADS meeting we`ve seen some beading in calcium supplements, just opened which seems to be something that, if it doesn`t spoil the vit d does cut the amt of calc that sticks. Maybe too much moisture in the air when they made that batch? 
Also possible problems w/ certain vit supplements(spoilage maybe). I only say this because i was having problems w/ straight ff diets w/ alternate calc/vit dusting and springs that I haven`t seen since I went back to crickets 1x a week. Growth rates have resumed and problems have cut back to nill. I also saw frogs spitting out flies only when I used herpta vite. Never w/ calcium dust but always w/ the vitamins. i figured I`d cut back to 1x a week w/ weak vit dust w/ calc to cover it. I don`t know what`s going on w/ them I just know it`s better to feed well fed foods to diversify the diet as much as to not overload w/ anything in particular. I guess I don`t really trust the supps anymore.


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

Hi Aaron,

The main thing I want to point out is that there are a lot of things coming together here.. (hence when I did the talk on Amphibian Nutrition at the IADS and Frogday it was Amphibian Nutrition what we don't know...) 

One of the things to keep in mind is that crickets may be calorically more dense than ffs (simple size item..)....for example pinhead crickets tend to be around 949 kcal/kg*. The values for complete energy are not comparable with the units given in the NAG online article for ffs as those are total gross energy and not corrected for undigestiable material. The numbers should increase with the size of the cricket... 


With respect to the beading, there could be other items going on with it as well... unless someone does some analysis we won't know the actual cause. Not disputing your observations but we can't assign a definite causality to it yet. We don't know the cause of the beading so we don't know if it is actually a problem or not. 

One of the things people often overlook is that the supplements on the market are made to be used with crickets and other larger feeder invertebrates not with ffs so there could be issues along those lines as well (one unpublished study by Dr. S. Donoghue demostrated that ffs retain a lot more supplement in relation to the body size of the insect...) 

* Finke, Mark D.; 2002; Complete Nutrient Composition of Commercially Raised Invertebrates Used as Foods for Insectivores; Zoo Biology 21:269-285


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