What do you feed your crickets?

Posted by Sarah on April 10, 2008

Just like people get nutrition from the food they eat, reptiles get nutrition from the foods they eat.

Unfortunately, the nutrition the reptiles get is affected by what their prey ate last.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s important to feed your feeders!

If you are feeding your reptiles crickets, what you feed your crickets can have a great impact on your reptile’s nutrition.

Gutloading crickets is the process of feeding crickets nutritious food, so that the nutrition will be passed on to your pets.

This is a lot easier if you feed your crickets after you get them, but if you don’t want to do this talk to your cricket supplier and ask how they are feeding the crickets.

If the foods they are feeding don’t seem nutritious enough for your pet reptile give the crickets some more nutritious food at least 4 hours before you feed the crickets to your reptile.  That way the nutrition will be able to be passed along to your pet.

When you are buying crickets look around and make sure that the crickets are kept in clean conditions, without too many dead crickets in the bottom of the cage.

One local store always has flies or mosquitos flying out of their live crickets – we definitely don’t get crickets from them.  Gross!

If you do buy crickets in bulk it’s a lot easier to make sure they are properly gutloaded – you already have a place to keep them while you’re gutloading them, and you know what you’re feeding them.

We buy our crickets from LLL Reptiles in the winter.  We usually get 2000 .5 inch crickets at a time – this ensures that the crickets won’t get too big for our chameleons before we use them.

After it’s too cold to get the crickets shipped to us we buy crickets locally, which is really a pain because we often have to go to the store two times a week for crickets - and that’s not counting the times we go to buy crickets and the store doesn’t have any available .

We feed our crickets Orange Cube Complete Cricket Diet 12 oz, from Doctors Foster and Smith.

Jeff likes it because it’s easy to clean up out of the cage, and it doesn’t blend in with the mess the crickets make.

It’s also a complete food, so we don’t have to water the crickets, and worry about crickets drowning.

We’ve also had the best cricket survival rate while feeding our crickets the Orange Cubes as well.

In addition to that, we also don’t have to worry about moldy, smelly cricket food.

We’ve been really happy when we’ve ordered from Doctors Foster and Smith, and our most recent order was no exception.

We ordered the Orange Cube Complete Cricket diet Tuesday night with regular shipping, and recieved it today.

Of course we’re only one state away, but that’s still pretty impressive.

We do occassionally feed our crickets other foods, but the Orange Cubes are the easiest ones to use, and the ones we use most often.