so, usually i go to the store and buy $4 worth of crickets a week (at 15/$1) and then feed my toads every other day. and this system worked fine until my dad bug bombed the house. the crickets i had in the container at the time all died, naturally, so i went and bought new ones.

i rinsed the cage (the house was also completely aired out) and put them in, but two days later when i went to feed my toads, all the crickets were dead. so i rinsed the container again and had the same results the next morning with new crickets. With the third batch, i soaked the container in hot water for an hour before drying it and putting the new crickets in, and then i left it sitting in a different room then before. Four hours or so later, i looked in and a majority of the crickets had died. But the odd thing was that the crickets who hadn't died were twitching strangely: they were lying on their stomachs (or is "their undersides" more correct) with their legs bent backwards, completely off the bottom of the container, and twitching. I'd almost call it a seizure.

So I dumped those crickets out in the yard and ran the container through the dish washer and tried one more time. Now the new batch is doing the same thing as before (although, they seem to be doing better than the last batch, it's been about 12 hours and a large number of them are still alive, and some are even still walking around normally) and I have no idea why. I can't feed my toads while the crickets i'm keeping are dying, so i've resorted to bying 15 seperately to feed them immediately after buying, but i've already spent almost $20 on crickets in the last 5 days.

I'm interested to know why this is happening, if anyone has any ideas, but i'm more interested in making it stop happening. I'm just about ready to go buy a new container, but if that doesn't work then I have no idea what else to try.

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