Reptile & Amphibian Forums

I want to find a really cheap food insect that can be a staple diet for a variety of herps.. Chams, leo gecks, frogs, tiger sallies, etc.. Crickets are good, but cost a bunch, and stink too bad to breed.. I had silkworms, but only the Chameleon liked them.. and I can get the second generation of eggs to hatch..

Are the Hissing roaches any good?? Are they easy for the herp to digest?? Or are they like the mealworms...and not that great??

What is good amount to start a tiny colony??

Thanks,

Harpy
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Have You Hugged Your Herp Today?

One.. whoever told you mealworms weren't that great has obviously been listening to those sources that say they would be "too hard to digest". Properly gutloaded, mealworms are a good staple diet for many insect eating herps. Just think, in the wild, those same insect eating reptiles would be taking anything they could fit in their mouth that was eatable. Beetles, larvae, ants, roaches, etc. And most of the prey items would be full of hard chitin.. especially the beetles. I don't know where it came from that the chitin content of an insect makes it a less than perfect food to raise for insectivores but its gotten a little too widespread. I've raised my leopard geckos on a steady diet of mealies from the time I got them through clutching 15 eggs this year from one female. I supplement with crickets, waxworms, superworms once in a while but for the most part they eat mealworms readily enough. My hatchlings have never seen a cricket and they're all healthy... (Have one male Blizzard less than 3 months old and already 7 inches long) So I'd recommend mealies and roaches if you want. Mealies are much cheaper, need less space and produce more consistantly. I bought a colony of 2000 to start with...I produce well over what I need to feed out almost 600 mealies a week to 6 geckos.

Actually, mealworms are a very poor choice as a staple. Several sites offer nutritional information on feeder insects, now. The primary one, which compares several types of feeder insects including mealworms and earthworms appears to be down again, but www.wormman.com offers nutritional info on some of the insects they sell. Hunt around.
This one is often cited, but doesn't include mealworms: http://www.ent.iastate.edu/misc/insectnutrition.html
This is the site with the most complete info I've found:
http://www.michaelthorn.com/cfhs/vet/insect1.html
It may or may not be up, give it a try. I think the fellow's server is having issues.

The end conclusion of all of this research is that mealworms are clearly inferior sources of nutrition when compared with most other feeder insects, including crickets. They have a worse calcium/phosphorous ratio, and are lower in most essential nutrients. Those are the facts.

>>I want to find a really cheap food insect that can be a staple diet for a variety of herps.. Chams, leo gecks, frogs, tiger sallies, etc.. Crickets are good, but cost a bunch, and stink too bad to breed.. I had silkworms, but only the Chameleon liked them.. and I can get the second generation of eggs to hatch..
>>
>>Are the Hissing roaches any good?? Are they easy for the herp to digest?? Or are they like the mealworms...and not that great??
>>
>>What is good amount to start a tiny colony??
>>
If it were me....and what I did for roaches for my smaller animals (the hissers are for the adult savannah monitor) is raise lobster roaches or something softer and more prolific. Hissers don't reproduce as well and are slower than the smaller roaches that you can start with.
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Sonya

Hisers do have a harder shell than most other roaches. If you are fine with climbers than lobster definately reproduce the fastest. You can get them in the classifieds for cheap. Just beware that they are very fast and hard to contain. In the cage you can use valesine or bug stop, but it becomes hard when trying to feed them to your pets. You need to either use bug stop in your pets cages or feed them in a separate container. If you don't want to deal wit the climbers I would go with the blaptica dubia (orange spotted roach). These guys breed pretty good and it is very easy to tell males from females. I would buy as many as you can afford and let them breed. It will take a few months to get a good colony going, but once you have a couple hundred adults you will produce hundreds of babies every month. These guys have little to no smell and only need a cleaned cage every few months. Someone else mentioned mealworms, and I'm sure they would also work, but I am just a fan of roaches. All my animals I have raised on them are very fat and healthy and I have yet to have a lizard that would not eat them. Plus they are so easy to gutload, because they will eat whatever you give them. Good Luck..
James

I'm raising lobster roaches... I'm happy with them, thus far. They are extremely prolific breeders, which hissers are not--they are also softer-bodied than most roaches, and don't get as large as hissers (but still reach a respectable size). Hissers are all sharp chitin. I've raised them before. They are slow breeders.

Their primary attraction is the fact that excess hissers might be sold as pets, though I wouldn't count on getting rid of a lot of them that way.

Research may suggest they aren't an ideal feeder insect... but..I never said they had to be the only feeder. A varied diet is better than any one feeder insect can provide. Mealworms act as a good "base" that are easy to breed in large numbers. Crickets are a rather large pain to work with...Not to mention, you can't really argue with success...What works for one person may not for another but experience is the best teacher regardless.

Then too, with the decent supplement powders they have, dusted anything is probably going to be decent, if not great.

I'm going to mix mealies, crickets, and lobsters (roaches) for my lizards. The lobsters and crickets will make up the bulk, with mealies being given every other or every third feeding, though.
I don't think mealies are a great idea for an insect to make up the bulk of the diet, though I know many people are doing it because it's convenient.

Ron Tremper feeds all his geckos nothing but supplemented mealworms as far as I know...and look at some of his leopard geckos. Some of the most gorgeous representatives of the morphs Tremper produces..So, truthfully, most of this theory about mealies not being a good diet is weighed out by the fact its successful regardless of what some scientist says. Science isn't perfect, nor does it have all the answers...especially not when it comes to the diets of animals..I mean look at it this way..Labs have fed their animals nothing but lab blocks and fortified food...and thats it... Yeah, all the necessary nutrients are there....but there's very little variation to the amount of certain vitamins, trace minerals and amino acids in those types of food. And as we all know, some animals need more of something than another of the same species would..so some animals are routinely not getting what they need...mixing up the diet a bit is a good way to insure you're covering all the bases. Same goes for the mealworm issue...While good as a staple..it shouldn't be the whole diet though it can be done...still its my personal preference to use mealies as a "base" diet and supplement once a week or so with crickets or waxworms.

In the end, its up to the owner what they do or do not prefer. But, you really can't argue with success...and I know alot of people who've had amazing success with an all mealworm diet for geckos and other small insectivores.

My question would be how long they live for. Just because short-term they produced nice looking animals doesn't mean it the best food source. I am not here to debate with you. Everyone is entitled to there own opinion. I think it is easier to breed roaches than crickets or mealworms. I know all the lizards I've raised bred and looked better once I switched them to roaches. This is just my personal observation. Anyway, do whatever you think is best for you animals.
James