Reptile & Amphibian Forums

These fuzzy worms/caterpillars show up in the cricket orders, and seem to breed faster than the damn crickets do...
Are they safe for the dragons to eat? Seems a shame to let good creepy-crawlies go to waste.

Thanks.
D.A.

They're a type of carrion beetle larva which alot of cricket breeders use to eat any dead crickets up. I don't think they are harmful to your dragon but I am not 100%. My dragon did eat one of them one time, I didn't notice it was in the bag with the crickets I had dumped out to feed them. It fell out of the bag, and was eaten by my dragon about the same instant I realized it wasn't a cricket. She suffered no apparent ill effect from it though.

and they are harmless, the dragons love them, but do leave enough in your bin to clean up any die offs, they are good creepy crawlies i usually leave them in there until i get another order, then i clean the bin and feed them out.
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reiko
photos

That's what I thought I remembered reading... Just couldn't find the post again.

We have more than enough of them to feed to the dragons and to tend to the clean-up duties too, since they also seem to like some of the foods we give the crickets, and are thriving to say the least.

I'm just a little hesitant to feed any insect that has hairs, since they can be a defense mechanism. Those little hairs can sometimes be very irritating. Glad to know these aren't.

Thanks again.
D.A.

topic, but do you worry at all about what might have killed your crickets that these fuzzy guys eat?

Sometimes I get a batch of crix that seem to have more mortality than others, and I'd never feed the dead ones to my dragon. It just seems like feeding beetles that ATE the dead ones as a habit might net you some grief.

*shrug*

was old age and a bit of over-crowding.
Seems the minute we ordered a new batch of crickets, one of our dragons decided it was time to brumate, and one of the others decided that it likes pellets a bit more than crickets...
So instead of 3 dragons eating 150-200 crickets a day, 2 dragons are eating only 75-100 a day. And since there was roughly 6600 crickets to start with, the oldest ones probably expired before they got eaten. Also, I'm not entirely convinced that these worms really wait for a cricket to die.

*sigh* Murphy's law at work, I guess...
Go figure...

D.A.

.

do have more larges die than I did mediums when Kiana was smaller. Maybe they are just old when I get 'em.

Last winter, after Kiana finally beat coccidia and started getting her appetite back , I bought 220 crix. A week later she started brumating. I ended up tossing about 150 of the stinky little buggers out into the snow. :

If you order large/adult crickets, you've got about 2 weeks at best before they start dying off. Less, if they've been sitting around where you bought them from for any length of time.

And as I said earlier, over crowding will take it's toll as well.
Not sure exactly how many crickets can be kept in a 50 gallon rubbermaid container, but I can tell you that 6500 is over the limit.

From now on we'll be keeping no more than 3000 in one container that size.

( Anybody out there got a formula for how many crickets can be kept per gallon of space? )

D.A.