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Guide to Feeding Crickets
Crickets require different feeding regimes based on their life cycle and final use. Proper cricket nutrition involves a balance between daily maintenance and gut loading for feeder crickets. For daily maintenance, opt for cost-effective dry foods like chicken feed or dog kibble. For gut loading, provide crickets with nutrient-rich foods, including leafy greens, pumpkin powder, and calcium-rich supplements. Proper moisture levels and humidity are crucial to avoid mold and bacteria growth, ensuring crickets remain healthy and safe for your pets.
Adult crickets order in bulk are easy to keep alive. They will thrive on both prepared rations and food scraps. The keeper feeding crickets to pets will need to manage a gutloading vs daily maintenance equation.
Daily Maintenance for cricket colony
Daily maintenance of a colony of adults can be done with a varied diet of dry foods. Cricket chows are clean and convenient, but can be pricey. Other dry foods such a dog or cat kibble are choices that will offer plenty of protein and are more cost effective that bagged cricket food. A very cost effective strategy is the use of chicken feed. A decent chick starter formula will cost around 40 cents per pound, whereas a formulated dry cricket food will cost around $2.00 per pound. So for daily maintenance of adults who are not going to be fed out within the next 24 hours, a dry ration of pet food is cheap and convenient.
Gut Load your feeder crickets
Crickets that are destined to be dinner shortly should be gut-loaded with items that are not just high in protein, but other macro and micro nutrients as well. These unlucky individuals should be placed in a separate feeding container and provided with a gut load that includes calcium, and essential vitamins. Foods with vitamin C, D3, and B complex are needed in a gutload, not for the cricket’s sake, but for the pet’s sake.
Leafy greens should be offered, along with a yellow vegetable. For really busy people who want to stick to a dry feed, chicken starter mixed with a good gutload formulation and supplemented with a smidgeon of dried pumpkin powder or paprika will help to stretch the feeder budget while providing all the necessary ingredients. Egg shells ground into a very fine powder in the blender or food processor can supplement the available calcium in the prepared dry food if it is not a calcium supplemented formulation.
Crickets will certainly do very well on all sorts of table scraps. The rationale behind offering a dry ration instead boils down to two things, convenience and odor. Temperature and humidity will affect odor.
Cricket Habitat Humidity
Adult crickets thrive in a habitat with 40% humidity and temperatures between 80-90°F. However, at these levels, food scraps can spoil quickly, requiring careful habitat management. Maintaining the correct humidity and temperature ensures a healthy cricket colony, reducing the risk of mold and bacteria growth. Nymphs need even more heat and humidity than adults, so their habitat can become foul very quickly.
Don't Let Food Get Moldy
Moist foods in the container that are not cleaned away and replaced daily will go bad pretty quickly. Some lazy keepers have even sadly reported feeding bacteria infected bugs to their pets and making them sick. Feeder crickets presented with a dry gut load do not run the risk of this. They will need water in some form, such as a damp sponge, paper towel, or water gel.
Stay at home DYI keepers can choose from a huge assortment of moist food stuff if that is the route they choose. Candidates for a moist gut load include the following items (and there are even more).
- Dandelion greens
- Kale
- Water cress
- Collards
- beet greens
- Berries
- Mulberry leaves
- Grape leaves
- Carrots
- Red pepper
- Bee pollen
- Mushroom powders
- Chia, flax, hemp seeds
- Spirulina
- Dried Kelp Powder
- Pumpkin rinds
- Butternut Squash
- Turmeric
- Paprika
Some of these ingredients will just be hanging around in the refrigerator; others are more specialized and will need to be ordered and measured out sparingly. For instance, one tablespoon of spirulina provides…
- Protein: 4 grams
- Vitamin B1 (thiamine): 11% of the RDA
- Vitamin B2 (riboflavin): 15% of the RDA
- Vitamin B3 (niacin): 4% of the RDA
The percentages are for human diets and just included here to provide a reference as to relative quantities. One pound of spirulina costs about $11 and should last all year for most hobbyists. So a dash of spirulina mixed with well ground Quaker oats and a little bit of eggshell makes a complete accompaniment to the moist items listed above.
When to avoid calcium in crickets
If feeding the crickets to other insect pets such as tarantulas and emperor scorpions, avoid added calcium. They don’t need very much due to their exoskeletons and too much can actually be harmful. So what you gut load your feeder crickets with just before offering them to a pet will depend on the kind of pet that is on the receiving end of the meal.
Protein for Young Crickets
Young hatchling crickets require a high-protein diet to support rapid growth. Optimal food choices include protein-rich options like rice cereal, wheat germ, and alfalfa seeds. Providing these nutrients ensures your crickets develop healthily, making them more nutritious for your pets.
As the cricket colony matures, an odor will become detectable. Some of it may be rotting vegetation, and some of it may be frass. Frass is the term for cricket poop. Crickets themselves do not smell regardless of what they eat. Their poop however, is another matter. Also, dead crickets will decompose and smell bad very quickly as well. It is this odor, which can become incredibly strong and disgusting in as little as one week of neglect, that argues in favor of a dry ration for people who are too busy to sanitize their cricket colony daily.
Change substrate daily
For large cricket colonies, especially those with 1,000+ crickets, daily substrate changes are essential. Removing food remnants and dead crickets helps prevent cannibalism and bacterial infections. Proper food and waste management ensure a healthy environment, reducing the risk of disease and odor in your cricket colony.
Pregnant female breeding crickets will require protein above the quantities required by non-breeding feeder insects on a maintenance diet. For those, a dietary protein allotment of 20-22% protein is sufficient. Egg-laying females need to be offered a ration that contains ½ as much in the way of carbohydrates and twice as much protein. This can be accomplished by withholding all vegetables except those needed for moisture, and doubling the amount of protein powder, such as the spirulina mentioned above, in the provided dry ration.
In a pinch, a high quality cat kibble such as Diamond Naturals Chicken and Rice Formula at 40% protein content will do. Any pelleted food will need to be crushed a little to allow the hungry future mothers easy access. Females will need to be removed from the breeding area after one week. If they have laid their eggs, they will die after about two weeks, contributing to odor and the potential for disease in the hatching container.
Understanding cricket nutrition takes a little work, as will finding the right combination of cost, complete ration formulation depending on the crickets’ age and use, convenience, and sanitation. Once a routine is established, they are not that hard to raise and maintain.