Those with pets who eat crickets,

[rafiki]

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[Carrie12345]

The title and text confused me for a moment. Buy them? My pets just hunt around the house at night to get their fill!

 

(I have cats, lol.)

[Laurel]

Petsmart and petco sell them. They usually have bags ready to go with 15 or 30, but you can also ask for a certain number.

 

I never needed to store them. I just dumped the bag in The terrarium and then bought more next time I was in town.

 

I would also pay the kids to catch them outside.

[lmrich]

we buy ours at Petco. My son stores them in a little plastic critter keeper thing with some cricket food. We need to buy them every 10 days or so. He has a bearded dragon.

[Cinder]

The title and text confused me for a moment. Buy them? My pets just hunt around the house at night to get their fill!

 

(I have cats, lol.)

 

My first thought, too! :lol:

 

I went with a friend once to get crickets for her son's gecko. She said you have to put a piece of cardboard in the bag/box so they have something to chew or they'll chew on each other. I also asked why she couldn't just catch them around the house. She said those were too big. She had to buy the small ones. If she got big ones they'd eat the gecko from the inside before the gecko could digest it. :ack2: So be sure you get the right sized crickets for your pet.

[The Girls' Mom]

Most pet supply stores sell them. You can store them in this: http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2752730 which they'll also have there. If you store them for long, you'll need some sort of food/water for them as well. Something like this: http://www.petsmart.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2753961 will also gut load them, making them more nutritious for your pet.

[DawnM]

My boys just finished up their Reptiles and Amphibians merit badge and had a toad for 30 days. I made them go in our yard and catch crickets and grasshoppers for it the entire time! :D

[Granny_Weatherwax]

We buy crickets at the local pet store. We can get 12 for $1.

We buy our crickets once a week so they are always fresh and healthy. It was recommended to us to feed the gecko one to two crickets at a time.

 

DS uses a plastic cricket cage that someone gave him. He puts some fresh fruit and water soaked cotton balls inside so crickets have something to eat and drink.

 

This is what the container looks like:

[Alessandra]

Oh, brother... we had anoles for about a year and a half. They would eat live mealworms or live crickets. The mealworms were so yucky I never tried them. We got crickets from a local pet store in the next town about ten minutes away. We were lucky because the pet store owner always had crickets in various sizes -- anoles prefer small ones. (The pet store in our town mostly had larger crickets and was sometimes out of them.)

 

We kept the crickets in a commercial 'cricket keeper.' It was not difficult, but after a while we got pretty tired of feeding the crickets to feed the anoles, buying new crickets -- they couldn't be left in a hot/cold car, so they always had to be the last thing I bought, etc. I began to long for a pet that could eat food that came in a large bag from Costco!

 

You can feed the crickets on bits of vegetables, like a slice of potato or you can feed them commercial cricket food. We used a cricket food and a cricket gel, as well as vegetables. The crickets have to be well nourished, because they provide the nourishment for you pet. Calcium powder is also a good idea. Our pet store would dust the crickets, or you can do it yourself -- but it has to be done shortly before they are fed to the pet. (If anoles, for example, don't have enough calcium, they may not have enough strength in their jaws to catch & eat the crickets.)

 

Oh, crickets can small a bit, so an out of the way place is best. In any case, you will have to wash out the cricket keeper before each new batch of crickets.

 

The crickets were fun at first, but, in the long term, I did not enjoy them.

[happypamama]

My first thought, too! :lol:

 

I went with a friend once to get crickets for her son's gecko. She said you have to put a piece of cardboard in the bag/box so they have something to chew or they'll chew on each other. I also asked why she couldn't just catch them around the house. She said those were too big. She had to buy the small ones. If she got big ones they'd eat the gecko from the inside before the gecko could digest it. :ack2: So be sure you get the right sized crickets for your pet.

 

Yes, the cardboard can be helpful, if you won't be going home right away. For a few minutes, though, we've not had a problem with the crickets chewing on each other. For our five-year-old leopard gecko, we buy the large crickets that PetCo/PetSmart carries, not the small ones, but even the large ones are not as large as the crickets in the yard. We get about 30 every few weeks, kind of whenever we're near a PetCo/PetSmart. We keep ours in a plastic cricket cage with some food and some "water" (it's like a gel).

[6packofun]

I buy them in bulk (500) and store in a tub with a screen top that we rigged. We feed them so that they're healthy for our lizards and just use them gradually. In the winter, it can be hard to keep them on hand and some places do not deliver live crickets to residences when it's very cold, so I end up buying 50-100 at Pet Supplies Plus or Petsmart and storing them in the cricket keeper.

[cloversandlions]

My dd has a small leopard gecko. We have to buy the small crickets, and our local pet shop does not separate, and therefore, cannot guarantee the size. A few weeks after we got the gecko, I hadn't realized that there was a *really* large cricket in a batch I bought locally, and it was accidentally placed in the cage with the gecko. Geck had a gash on the top of his head for several weeks until it healed. Now, we go to Petsmart (one hour away, thank you very much!) because they have them separated by size. I don't buy the little boxes of pre-packaged crickets; I always buy the crickets "fresh" from the bin, which means I need to find someone to scoop them out first. We were initially keeping them in a plastic critter carrier (designed for crickets), but it cracked, so I switched to a 5-gallon glass aquarium with a mesh lid. We feed the crickets commercially produced food (I assume it has the vitamins that the geck needs) and use the gel ...stuff for water for the cricks. Occasionally they get a treat like fruit.

 

Anyone want a leopard gecko? He's cute, but to me, this is a huge hassle! Plus, it's very dry here, and keeping the cage moisturized is a challenge.

 

(My son's snake must be fed frozen "pinkies". It's so sad [i feel very sorry for the mama mice!] but at least they're easy to "keep" until it's time to feed the snake.)

[Baseballmom]

We have small tarantulas. They only eat about once every two weeks. At first we had to go to the exotic pet store to get the pinhead crickets. They don't sell that size at petsmart or petco. They have grown now, and can eat (not that they really eat them) the small crickets. We still just get fresh ones for each feeding. We tried to get more at a time and they just died.

[Jann in TX]

In case you did not know baby bearded dragons are bottomless pits and 80% of their diet needs to be 'protein'-- and crickets are usually the choice (but we did raise silk-worms too).

 

The last time around we had 2 babies at the same time! Each eating 25 or so crickets DAILY!

 

I purchased them online in 500's or 1000's. We kept them in a deep Rubber Maid storage container (clear with SLICK SIDES about 20 inches deep) and did not use a top. We put egg crates in for 'hides' and a small dish with damp paper towels or cotton balls for water (they would drown in a water dish). We fed them scraps of veggies and fruits (changing daily is important) and also fed them dry 'lizard pellets' (lizard food). The only time I ever had a problem was when I opened a box of 500 and DROPPED it as I was walking to dump it in the container! (That was a nightmare!!!).

 

I'm just elated that our bearded dragons are now happy healthy adults and eat 80% veggies and fruit. They get super worms (for some reason always kept on my kitchen bar counter...), canned crickets (yes dead crickets in a can that gets stored in my fridge!) and every month or so they get a few live crickets for salad croutons! I will raise a batch of silkworms a few times a year--they LOVE silkworms!

[skirch]

I usually placed a weekly order for 1,000 from LLL Reptile. It's $29.99 and that includes shipping. That's 3 cents each. WAY cheaper than at our Petco.

 

I had a 20 gallon aquarium with a screened lid I keep them in. I didn't use substrate because it's too messy for me. I had 2 large, flat dishes that I kept cricket food/water in. I saved paper towel tubes to put in there for the crickets to climb into. When I took them out I just grab a tube and shake some into the animal's cage.

 

You have to really keep up on the keeping the thing clean and picking out dead crickets because because it can get really smelly, really fast.

Edited August 3, 2011 by skirch

[Desert Rat]

We buy ours at Petco/petsmart. We only buy a week's worth. Our toads take 3 feedings a week. We poke holes in a cool whip size container, add a damp sponge or paper towel and a small piece of bread. They keep for the full week. Make sure you put the sponge and bread on opposite sides. Otherwise, it gets moldy. The crickets don't care. I do! :)

[NanceXToo]

Almost any pet store carries them. We feed them to our gecko.

 

Just be advised that if you leave them in the plastic bag the pet store puts them in, THEY CAN AND WILL CHEW THEIR WAY OUT and you will end up with crickets hopping all over your house, causing you to start shrieking and not wanting to walk around your own house for fear a cricket will jump onto your foot, and you will call your husband in an angry, traumatized panic demanding he come home from work IMMEDIATELY to find and catch every last cricket and never, ever bring them in the house again....

 

Cough.

 

Oh, wait. That was me.

 

So, uh, yeah, now they must be bought just a few at a time and fed immediately to the gecko, or stored in containers they absolutely cannot chew their way out of. :D

[Bassoonaroo]

Oh it's been years since Spotty and Surfy (leopard frogs -- one with a hormone issue as it never fully left its tadpole stage and had a tail for three years and never did grow that fourth leg) passed on to that giant lily pad in the sky...

 

But I remember buying crickets at Petco each week. I'd get a bag of them and we kept them in a clear plastic container with TINY holes in it.

 

The air holes in our frog habitat were just big enough for those tiny crickets to escape so we put tape over the holes. Usually the frogs got to the crickets before they could figure out how to get out though.

 

Once at Petco, when I was checking out, the cashier asked "so what are you feeding them?" I answered "raw potato" and he said, "Oh no, don't do that; they'll develop diarrhea."

 

I thanked him for his advice.

 

But really, how do you know if a cricket has diarrhea? And do you care if the cricket is on death row anyway.

[Ria]

I raised my own crickets for years in a small terrarium (mesh lid) with a reptile heat rock. You need substrate for the crickets to lay eggs in. I used fallen leaves from outside as bedding material and used dry dog and cat food as cricket food. You can google it...pretty easy to do.

[MamaJeanne]

We bought in bulk online for our baby beardy, too. Trying to keep up with how much they eat would have been crazy if I were spending 10/ $1 locally. When we just had a frog who ate much less that worked really well though.

[Frontier Mom]

I keep them in a Rubbermaid bin with screen on the top. Not sure how many you need, but they can't climb out of these and they seem to last longer with more room to roam.

 

I use paper towel tubes for them to hide inside. Be careful letting your kids catch crickets outside and feed them as it will often kill your reptile. Most reptiles are born and raised in captivity and have no immunities to pesticides or other contaminants a "wild" cricket may contain.

 

I found a local Mom and Pop type store that is no beauty to see but sells crickets really cheap. My beardies are rather large now so they only get crickets occasionally.

[RegularMom]

We get ours at Petco, too. We have a couple of fire bellied toads that eat them. We keep our crickets in a cricket holder and provide food and water for them.

 

It turns out fire bellied toads can live up to 30 years. RegularDad didn't think to ask about longevity when he bought those things for our 8yo. (sigh....)

[6packofun]

Btw, I buy from Grubco.com and am very satisfied. It's important, though, IMO, to buy from a supplier that is closer to you rather than across the country for the best chance of your crickets arriving ALIVE. lol