You would be surprised at how readily a 7 foot water will go after crickets or roaches.

I have adult waters that will go after crickets more readily babies will. I usually don't even bother feeding crickets to baby waters because they seem to want to take pinkies and small mice much more readily.

All that said I don't bother feeding crickets to my adult waters ( only on rare occasions for cheap amusement lol.) times are hard and crickets aren't cheap these days. I have smaller lizards that are in need of the crickets more than the monitors.

Large monitors do fine on a diet of rodents. There is no need to make their diet more complex for any health reasons, If you want to throw bugs at them for mental stimulation type purposes that is certainly fine but from a nutritional standpoint a vertebrate diet is going to be superior to insects for large monitors and certainly cheaper.

BTW on a side note, here in Fl. we do have these giant katydids that are the size of a small mouse and all the monitors seem to love them so of course if I catch one they go into one of the enclosures. Black roughnecks really go nuts over them which is not a surprise since large Katydids are a prominent feature of their natural habitat.

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