# gutloading crickets



## sbreland (May 4, 2006)

Inspired by Mikes terribillis thread in the eggs and tads section, I was hoping that you all could post your gut loading recipe for feeding crickets. I seem to be finding myself using more crickets lately and keeping them longer, so I guess it would be a good idea to start doing this. Also, do any of you add calcium to your gutload and if not is there any reason why (spoiling, contamination, etc)?


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## Ed (Sep 19, 2004)

I know I've typed this out most of this on here before but here I go again... 

Gutloading was originally a term that was coined to mean only diets intended to calcium load the insects before feeding them out but has been changed in the hobby to mean any diet that someone thinks maybe nutritious to the consuming herp. If you read about a diet in an article published/written by most (if not all) exotic animal nutritionists, they still mean it in this sense. 
(shortening it up a lot)... 
If you purchase crickets to feed out to the frogs then the crickets need to be held and fed for a minimum of 48 hours to replace lost fats and protiens to ensure you have the most nutritious cricket possible. 
If you are attempting to modify the calclium level of the crickets then you have to offer the high calcium diet as the only source of food (no fruit, no vegetables for water) and a plain source of water as the crickets will eat anything other than the high calcium food source. (High calcium food sources are very unpalatable to crickets). The temperature at which you have the best success of modifying the calcium level of the cricket is 80 F and in studies, the only size that normally ends up with a positive calcium to phosphorus ration are pinheads. 
The crickets have to be fed the diet for a minimum of 48 hours and fed out before 72 hours as the high calcium diet causes an increase in mortality which if the feeding is done properly will start to kill the crickets after about 72 hours. Also if there isn't a source of vitamin D3 for the frogs (either lights or supplemented) then the frogs will not be able to metabolize the calcium provided in the crickets. 
And finally it is not that hard to overdose the frogs on calcium (it has one of the narrowest safety margins typically between 1.8% and 3.8 % of the diet as dry matter. over this ratio and you get conditional deficienies of other minerals and possibly fatty soaps in the digestive tract). 

There are a lot of purported gut loading diets out there but look at them with a skeptical eye if they start claiming all kinds of wonders. 

Crickets are a fairly easy to insect to use as a vesicle to feed certain items to the frogs (like spirulina or other carotenoid containing supplements) etc but typically have a gut transit time (temperature dependent on around 12 hours (if I remember correctly) so all of the crickets should be consumed by that period of time. 

Crickets are also liked to corneal lipidosis in at least tree frogs and Ceratophrys but I have not seen it in dendrobatids as of yet. 

Some comments

Ed


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