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The Essentials to keeping your crickets healthy, to keep your pet healthy.
Great cricket care is essential to anything eating crickets. Diseased and crippled crickets don't offer the vital nutrients that fulfill the lives of those eat them. And when the crickets are raised properly, there is a greater chance that they will breed, increasing the longevity of your finite cricket supply. Here are some essential tidbits and bite-sized notes and facts about cricket care and how to sustain their health, to sustain the health of the feeder.
Here's the riot diet summary of those voracious crickets:
- plants
- potatoes and sweet potatoes
- apples, bananas, oranges, mangoes, berries, and pineapples
- dog food, cat food, chicken mash, corn meal, and other dry goods
- dry milk for muscle building
- the limbs and remains of dead insects
What Plants Work?
Crickets have herbivore tendencies, and glutton experiences. They thrive on soft rotting vegetation, which proves to be the easiest for them to consume. If unavailable, then fresh green leafy vegetation is an appropriate substitute. Once the vegetation travels beyond the scissor-like mandibles, the food will journey through the pharynx, and tunnel through the esophagus before being stored into the cricket's stomach. Inside the stomach, the food begins to digest through hydrolysis, as enzymes in the cricket's stomach helps to breakdown the food. Beyond the stomach, the food then enters the proventriculus, a chamber wielding cuticular teeth that grind the food into finer particles that eventually absorbs all the nutrients. The remaining material is passed through rectum, and expelled through the sphincter as fecal pellets.
What About Fruits and Vegetables?
Potatoes are among the best things to add to a cricket's diet. Crickets tend to respond to sweet potatoes better than traditional potatoes but any option will work. Their mandibles are limited in power, and it is necessary to cut up the potato, so to release the inner sweetness of that starchy spud.
Meanwhile, fruits are especially great for crickets to consume. Apples, oranges, bananas, mangoes and berries are popular choices. However, if you are feeding your crickets to bearded dragons, you will want to avoid anything with citrus.
These are not only good for crickets but they also contain a natural amount of water, which help fulfills another crucial need for every cricket on earth.
Dry Items Are Qualifying Candidates
Dry foods can be a nice addition to any cricket diet. Chicken feed, dry cat food, or dog food is great for crickets. But because cat and dog food have a variety of base ingredients, it is beneficial to search for vegetable-based dog and cat food. The vegetable based foods have more nutrients that will benefit the crickets, which will increase the health and longevity of your favorite bug-munching pets.
Mixed seeds can also be added. Pumpkin and sunflower seeds are great for a cricket's diet. You can even add powdered alfalfa and wheat bran into the habitat.
Gut-loading your crickets is essential if you plan on feeding them to your leopard gecko or bearded dragon.
Dry Milk Is the Body Builder
Dry milk is an especially helpful item for cricket growth. The crickets engorge the dry milk, and It helps to stuff the crickets and make their bodies larger and more nourished. This is a helpful tactic when trying to beef up your crickets in a short period of time.
What About Other Insects?
While crickets can enjoy many plant-based materials and seeds, they are also omnivores. Sure, they look cute, but crickets tend to consume smaller insects including their dead bodies. You can give crushed ant remains and other ground-up bodies of different insects to your crickets.
Make sure you give your crickets enough of these insects. They enjoy good meat sources from other insects and are even willing to consume other crickets just to stay nourished.
But keep in mind, although crickets are carnivores, you will need to remove decaying crickets from their habitat. When crickets die, their bodies release ammonia. This ammonia will accumulate in the base of your cricket habitat, and kill off your colony. So be sure to remove the deceased crickets from your cricket bins.