One Method for Keeping CricketsCrickets are easy to keep, and make interesting pets that happily sing to each other. Crickets are nervous creatures, and can become cannibalistic if not fed properly. They reproduce rapidly if kept in the right conditions, and you can quickly have hundreds of them, making them great food for larger pets, or just an enjoyable creature to observe.
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Cage SetupI keep my crickets in my favorite type of container... a 'Really Useful Box' sold in numerous sizes at Office Depot. I used a 9 liter sized container, and had holes drilled in the lid for ventilation. Be sure there is nothing too tall in the cage, or the nymphs (baby crickets) will be able to escape out the holes.
I spread inch or so of coconut fiber on the bottom of the container, and decorated the cage with small clay pot halves, excelsior, live backyard moss, coin wrappers, and a reptile food dish. In case you are wondering what excelsior is, it is a dried moss product that is often sold in craft stores for decoration. I got mine from Josh's Frogs; they use it for fruit fly cultures. I discovered that crickets love this stuff. It makes excellent climbing and hiding opportunities, especially for nymphs, and increases the cage space for the crickets exponentially. |
Feeding and WateringWith the right food and water, keeping crickets is a breeze. However, miss one of those points and discover a fiasco: cannibalistic and drowning crickets.
FoodI use Ghann's cricket feed, which contains all the essential nutrition for food. This can be purchased at their website. Really any commercial cricket stable will suffice, as long as it contains protein and calcium. Just to be safe, I sometimes supplement their food with some fish pellets. I have kept crickets on different things before, and not feeding enough protein results in crickets eating each other. I have had a lot of success using commercial cricket feed.
Crickets can live on many different things, including cat food, plain grains, fish feed, fresh greens, potato slices, etc., but I would still recommend the staple diet as the main deal. WaterI have tried many things, but 'Water Jelly' is the best thing ever. No more drowning crickets or annoying sponges! Meet the amazing Root Watering Crystals! This stuff is ultra easy to use and one container will last you years and years.Usually used for plants, this stuff is an easy cricket water gel that crickets gulp at. It stays wet for a long time, unlike a sponge. All you have to do to get it cricket-ready is pour a small amount in a jar and fill up the jar with tap water. In a hour or so, you will have cricket jelly!
This stuff can be purchased at garden stores. The pet store sells a similar stuff to this called 'Cricket Water' or something... but it is much more expensive, as just a few tablespoons of the root crystals will fill up an equivalent sized container. |
Care and Maintenance
Basically, keeping crickets involves replacing food when it molds (approximately every three days), picking out mold from surfaces, and removing dead crickets. Keep the cage in a dark area- preferably out of direct light. I keep my cage on a bookcase, which seems to do the trick perfectly.
Cricket Sexing and BreedingCrickets are ultra easy to breed. If they are well cared for, and happen to have some moist coconut fiber to lay eggs in, you will have baby crickets.
I had around four females and two males in my container. It is best to have many more females than males, as the males will pester the females, and fight the other males for the females as well. The eggs are tiny whitish things that look like minuscule grains of rice. Each female will lay a hundred or so eggs in her adult life, (which I'm estimating is around a month or so.) Once the eggs hatch, (a couple weeks) the nymphs will take a while (it seems like forever) to grow to adults (around 12 weeks.) Sex is not apparent until the crickets are very near to being an adult (around nine weeks old). Sexing a cricket is not too difficult. Female crickets have a long, thin appendage called an ovipositor (used to lay eggs deep in the soil). The ovipositor projects out the tip of the female's abdomen. All crickets have appendages on their abdomens called cerci, so sometimes it could be easy to mix these up with the ovipositor. The easy way to tell is males have two projections off their abdomens (two cerci) and females have three projections (two cerci and one central ovipositor). See the photo to the right of a female cricket. As a note: females are also usually lager and fatter than males. |
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Some Helpful Cricket Links:
- http://www.ghann.com/ - a website that sells house crickets as food for pets, but also sells cricket feed
- http://www.entnemdept.ufl.edu/walker/buzz/index.htm - an interesting website that allows you to identify your specific species of field cricket using photos and cricket song recordings
- http://www.joshsfrogs.com/ - a helpful website that sells a multitude of pet care supplies
Some good books on this subject:
- Pet Bugs: A Kid's Guide to Catching and Keeping Touchable Insects by Sally Kneidel - this is an awesome reference book that covers a lot of useful information