Crickets Breeding Made Simple

Transcription

1 2011 Crickets Breeding Made Simple Chris Johnson All Rights Reserved

2 By Chris Johnson All Rights Reserved 2

3 Crickets Breeding Made Simple Unlimited Supply Healthy, Clean & Virus free Crickets. CHRIS JOHNSON 3

4 Bonus 1 : What You Should Do When The Crickets Are Affected with Virus or Parasites? When Things Go Wrong Something is going to go wrong. Something always does. When that happens, you ve got to be prepared for it. Disease and parasites may creep into your colony despite your best efforts to keep it clean. You might accidentally pick up a bad batch of soil for the breeding cups; someone might open the enclosure s lid and not notice a single, stray fly drifting inside. At first you might consider trying to treat your sick crickets. There have to be chemicals and medicines on the market to help them recover, right? That may be, but there s something important to consider. Would you want these crickets that have been sick and treated to be fed to your lizard? Remember, that s the entire point of raising these things to begin with, as food for your lizard and potentially as food for the lizards and toads and other insectivorous pets of other people. What goes into your crickets is going to go into your pet. Do you really want to take that risk? Probably not. The best thing to do when your crickets are stricken with disease or parasites is to simply let them go or humanely kill them. Take them out to the nearest woods, field or ditch and dump them out, or stick them in a freezer. Discard all of their disposable crates and cups. Dispose of the vermiculite too. Take home your enclosures and scrub them down, using soap, water and vinegar again, and let them thoroughly air dry for a couple of days. Drying in the sun for a couple of days is optimum, as exposure to sunlight will take care of any mold or mildew spores still inside of the tank. You ll need the time to order a fresh batch of crickets anyway. Don t shy away from ordering a new batch from your supplier to prevent inbreeding and to give your colony a fresh start, it s a good idea to order new supplies once or twice a year anyway. Some farms will give you quite a good deal on them, sometimes as cheap as about fifteen dollars for up to one thousand crickets. But how do you know when your crickets have just been infested by parasites or have acquired a disease that would make feeding them to your lizard a bad idea? Some commercial suppliers will regularly have their crickets tested by university laboratories to make certain their stock are disease and parasite free. This likely isn t an option for the amateur breeder. Sometimes, you won t even realize something has gone wrong until they die off en masse. Kenneth McFarlane has had some bad experiences with cricket deaths. He says, I have had two large batches of crickets die off on me while breeding them, plus several occasions where they've died from various reasons while I haven't been breeding them. The first time was while I was keeping the crickets in large pails... I was keeping the pails in the basement at the time, and came home to find a mouse in one of them. The mouse had already killed off a couple dozen crickets when I found it. I got it out and kept my cricket colony well fed. The next day most of the crickets in that pail had died. Two days after that they were all dead. Rodents = bad news for bugs. 4

5 Some of the diseases that have been found infesting crickets in pathology reports are: Citrobacter Freundii, Provendencia Rettgeri, Proteus Vulgaris, Klebsiella Pneumoniae, and the Aeromonas species. Each of these can have some serious, nasty effects on your lizards, toads and other insect loving reptiles. It s recommended that you keep a very close eye on the health of your reptile, and if it displays any signs of being ill, be prepared to dispose of your cricket colonies and to start over. Also be sure to have established a relationship with a good herpetological veterinarian who can help you to identify these diseases, if worse comes to worst. One easy to recognize parasite that attacks crickets and grasshoppers is commonly called the Horsehair Worm, from the phylum Nematomorpha. While they are completely harmless to humans, they will lay eggs that are ingested by the crickets. The larvae hatch in their digestive tracts, whereupon they burrow through the intestinal wall to continue development in the abdominal cavity. Upon reaching maturity, the horsehair worm exhibits a curious ability to coerce the cricket into committing suicide by drowning itself in water. Scientists believe the parasitized cricket is made to feel incredibly thirsty, explaining why it is drawn to a source of water. After it s dead, the worm pulls itself out of the abdominal cavity through the anus, wriggling in the water like a Gordian knot in fact, another name for the horsehair worm is the Gordian worm, for this very trait where it seeks out a mate to repeat the process. 5

6 By Chris Johnson All Rights Reserved 6