Posted by:
Hemipene
at Mon Sep 15 04:57:52 2003 [ Email Message ] [ Show All Posts by Hemipene ]
I keep leo's and golden gecko's. The 2 golden's live in a 60g tank that is quite heavily planted, with lots of logs, caves, and rocks, on a humid coconut mulch substrate which great stuff for laying cricket eggs in. It's not easy for me either to catch any excess crickets or their babies without having to get in there and rip it all apart.
Many of the nymphs sometimes end up drowning in the water bowl, the fruit baby food, or in the water fall, so that solved *some* of the problem, but there would still be a lot of them running around. One day as an experiment, actually - out of frustration *lol* I started to use a small plastic container which I put in the bottom of the tank against the glass to feed the gecko's with hoping this would keep the female crickets out of the substrate. It did work, they would go in and eat some crickets, but they still preferred hunting for them out in the open space. So, I eventually went back to just tossing them loose in the tank like before and let them hunt for them.
As I was getting ready to scrap the feeding from the container idea, I took the container out and noticed that it was full of baby crickets.
This container is the bottom of a large clear Mazzola cooking oil bottle that I cut the top off of. Any plastic or glass container will do as long as it's deep enough. It is 4 inches high. Since you have an AFT, if you want to try this, you may want to use something that is not clear or he may try attacking the crickets from the outside if he see's them. My gecko's did this a few times in the beginning until they figured out they had to climb up the glass then down into the container that was leaned against it. This is why I needed a rectangular shaped container of a certain size with straight flat sides to do this. I couldn't find anything similar, or that was not tapered at the store, so I just made one out of what I had handy at the time.
I use this now mainly to catch any babies and large uneaten crickets that may still be roaming around in gecko's tank. I put in either a piece of fruit, slice of carrot, green bean, romaine lettuce - whatever, a bit of the mix that I make up for gutloading my crickets and mealies, and a bit of ground up dry cat food. Then I take a long piece of the side of an egg carton and make a ramp from the substrate up to the top of the container. The crickets will go up the ramp and jump into the container to get at the food. It's just high enough to keep the crickets from jumping back out, although a very large one can get out if he jumps hard enough. It works very well for me, and the gecko's will still occaisionlly climb in and grab a cricket or two when they want. Once I see a bunch in there, I carefully take the container out, dump the big crickets back into a 10g I use to keep them in, all the nymphs go into a smaller bin and I raise them up. I rarely have to buy crickets.
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RE: Cricket nymphs all over terrarium: how do I remove, control, or kill them? - Hemipene, Mon Sep 15 04:57:52 2003