Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I recently got a pair of young ackies and have them set up in a 20 gal right now while they are small, and plan to move them to a large enclosure in a few months when they get bigger. My problem is that some of the crickets have bred in their tank. I thought this would be nice, free food right? But now there are so, so many little crickets of all sizes running around that I'm getting a bit worried for the monitors. Are all these little crickets going to stress out the monitors? There are so many and most of them are so small that the lizards don't appear to be trying to eat them, but they are constantly having to shake them off as the crickets crawl on them. What should i do, if anything? So far I've just been putting in dry cricket food on the dirt so that the crickets eat that and hopefully don't try and snack on the monitors. Shall I dump the whole substrate out and start over, or just not worry about it and be glad that when the crickets get a bit larger my ackies will have free food? Any advice much appreciated.

What should you do? DITCH THE LIZARDS hahahahaha.

No really, dont do that but you could if you want a little cricket breeder tank or keeper tank. The fact is, if you get alot of crickets breeding in your tank that usually means you have decent conditions for monitors, usually...

I keep many many many crickets in my hatchling ackies cages at once, mostly a ton of adult crickets and some babies. I would just throw some food in there for the crickets or you could burry a small glass bowl to the surface of your dirt and put a small piece of vegi in the middle and the crickets will collect in there (from Krusty) or you could just leave them be...

Just make sure you conditions are right and they have plenty of usable space.

Cheers,
Mike.

...or you can take out the cage furniture (and monitor) and stir up the soil. Stirring is a good thing from time to time anyway. This should kill the majority if you don't want to mess with them.

I would probably try to eliminate some of the crickets, trap them in the bowl or something, small monitors can be a treat for larger crickets, keeping some cricket food is a good idea, I use a piece of rodent food and the crickets will eat it instead on the monitor in most cases. The one thing I have seen is that from seeing crickets 24/7 my monitors dont seem as enthused about eating them. Kinda like you or me working at a pizza shop, how long could you eat free pizza before wanting something else?
Bob

Thanks for the advice guys. I will try and trap some of the crickets in a small bowl and remove them. I really feel like it can't be good for their health or sanity to have these little bugs crawling all over them and possibly trying to nibble on them all the time! I'll just take it as a good sign that their conditions are fairly good.