Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Out of the 15 or so pet store supers I started with, I have one beetle and one pupa, two or three worms that are curling up, and then rest are dead. No big surprises there.

I orded 250 supers from wormman.com (great place, btw) and I've had them on oats with potatoes for about a week now. They've been eating away and shedding. These worms are a LOT bigger than the pet store ones, but the smaller pet store ones have pupated, or are going to. Soo my question is: how big is the last instar worm? And why are small worms pupating, not dying? Seems weird to me...

I'd like to get turn these guys into adults ASAP, I hopefully have lots of little leopard geckos coming in a few months. Thanks, Dave
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"i have a mortal wound!"
"where? where does it hurt?"
"oh, pretty much around the big bloody spot"
"come inside. ill get the neosporin. da na na na na - NEO! ba na na na na na na - SPORIN! blee nee nee......."

The smaller worms will turn into pupae but might die before turning into beetles. The ones that turn into beetles will be small, have less vigor and may not breed very well. I don't like using plain potato as a moisture source. I use baby carrots or yams/sweet potatoes(yellow or orange), they provide moisture AND nutrition. I use a mix of coarse wheat, 10 grain cereal and rice baby cereal for substrate. It took three - four months from the time I started to the time I could start isolating my own home bred worms. My home bred worms curled and pupated twice as fast as the commercial purchased worms I started out using. Now I have more worms than I will ever be able to use. I feed the extras to the birds or give them to friends as fishing bait.

It also has to do with the temperature. You might want to find a place that is 70 to 80 degree to keep them all time.

Brian
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