Reptile & Amphibian Forums

At the end of every day I take the dry pellets out of my dragons cage and rehydrate them, and put them in with my crickets. I have always thought that was a great way to recycle pellets. I have huge cricket bins, and I don't really have a good idea of what goes on in them...but

When I have crickets left over I sometimes put them in a critter carrier and give them a slice of orange... The other day I gave them some of the rehydrated food, and noticed how well they ate it..I could even see it through some ot their abdomens. Well...about 12 hours later these crickets started dying. They were fine until they ate the pellets. I got kinda worries because I always feed the pellets to my 1000s of crickets in my bins..so I got some more crickets and 2 cages. I fed one group the pellets and oranges and one group just chicken feed and oranges. The ones I fed the pellets to had 17 out of 30 die. The other group only lost 3 of 30. I cut several of the dead crickets open under the microscope and pulled out ROCK HARD pellets. I don't know if the pellets dried that hard after death, or that is what caused the death.

I am NOT saying that pellets are bad for dragons. I feed them to my dragons, and I haven't had problems with them. I am just wondering about why the crickets are dying with the pellets?? I have been putting them in my bins nightly, and I do not lose THAT many crickets, but there are about 20,000...so I really don't have that much of an idea how many I lose. They shed their skins, and that looks like dead cricket...

Anyone else ever notice this.. Also..some of the crickets that died...they seemed to lose control of themselves before they died...they couldn't control their limbs. they would try to move and their legs would just flail. I would flip them back over and they would try to walk....but they always ended up flipping back over.

I spend several hundered on crickets every month, thats why this is intresting me...just incase you think i am a weirdo for spending time with crickets.

Jen's Dragons
bcrazy_jen@yahoo.com
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MY Dragons!!

That is very weird. Rock hard pellets in there stomacks? Strange! Well if your spending several hundreds a month maybe you should go to dachiu.com and hit there cricket links you can buy like 20,000 for 15 or something.

Actually 20,000 crickets from them is around $250, but that is still a good price for them. The prices on their site are per 1000 crickets ordered..

if you order 1000 it is 17.00

if you order 10,000 it is 13.00 per thousand

Thanks for the suggestion though.
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MY Dragons!!

Errr oops lol. I only took a quick glance at the page sorry... Oh and have you tried breeding your crickets?

Crap i knew it was too good to be true!

that has me thinking now too.. because i also feed left over pellets to my crickets, mealies, and supers...i've been doing this for the past six months and haven't had a big die off in any of my feeder bins.. i also have 1000's of crickets so i can't monitor them closely..but have you tried to feed the pellets dry instead of rehrydating them..my feeders eat dry ones and don't have a problem.. maybe it was just a fluke..it sounds like they got impacted with the pellets...i just started feeding them wet pellets...maybe i'l monitor them and see if it makes a difference..

alissa

Looks like this has more than one of us going "Hmmmmmm...". lol
You posted yours while I was editing mine.

D.A.

I think you might have just figured out why so many of our last batch of crickets died...
I'd been giving them veggie and fruit scraps, then decided to throw them some pellets... The dragons won't eat 'em, but the crickets will. Seemed a good plan to get the pellets in the dragons anyway...
The only problem is, about 50 or 60 out of 500 crickets croaked before the dragons ever got to 'em...
Thought that maybe they just died of old age, but now I'm not so sure...

D.A.