Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I saw your reply farther down about breeding crix. Lol. Life, go figure.
I had a few probs, then finally was doing well with breeding crix. The only prob i had was raising them to adult size. They are a pain in the butt to water and feed only to grow them, but for feeding babies and small herps (I am starting more eggs for my brev's) they are great. I use coconut fibre. Buy it in blocks it is a lot cheaper. I had problems using topsoil, it molds quickly.
I'm going to be getting little sauce cups (like they use for dipping sauce at restaurants) so that I can keep the pinheads in small groups and put the cups right into the brev tank.
Ok, here goes.
Use about 2" of cocofibre. Make it wet, but not soupy. The good thing about cocofibre is it changes colour a lot so you can tell how wet it is. As the top layer lightens spray it with a mister (if you start with wet stuff you only have to do it once or twice while waiting for them to hatch). Oh, i forgot to mention, use clear plastic. Cricket eggs don't hatch, but they grow into crix. The new crix will be grey (egg coloured) and are basically eggs with legs, very cute. You will be able to see them walking around below the surface.
Keep them around 80-100*F to have them hatch quickly. They will still hatch at cooler temps but you'll be waiting for a month or more. Once they are hatched just feed them thin slices of carrot. I had problems with shaved carrots molding...
If you breed a lot of herps, i would look into using an undertank heater for your crix. I'll be getting one soon now that i'll be breeding them more for my brev's. You can use a basking light or something else for heat,be creative. I'll be dating mine and keeping all the little cups in a rubbermaid tub on a heat pad. Also, when they are young keep the pinheads on the substrate. Any that i've moved right away to a plain tub have dried up and died. I would leave them in the container and when they are big enough to jump out into the larger tub the conainers are in the should be ok without substrate. At that point feed them dry food and give a water source. If you mist the substrate you don't need to give the pinheads a water source, just carrot or lettuce for food.

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0.1 veiled - Luna
0.2 house geckos - Gaia & Tia (both MIA
0.2 felines - Kyndra and Líta
1.0 African Clawed Frog (for summer)
0.5 Mad. Hissers (for summer - all girls, no little ones, whew!)