Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Finally tried, now that their heads are a little bigger, and they loved them. I don't dare leave orange-heads in. Once they hide, they're going to stay hidden until it's dark, they won't keep stupidly popping out and getting eaten like crickets. But at night, they're a scavenger with a strong preference for meat, at least as dangerous as crickets if not more so. I had no trouble at all dropping small nymphs in one at a time though and watching them snap them right up under supervision. I can probably even switch over to a deeper salad dish and try keeping some in there on days that I can't swing home during the afternoon. Since I raise them anyway for my toad and skink but don't need anywhere NEAR the numbers that I produce, this will be a good thing. Maybe now I can slow down a little on the cricket purchases. It'll be nice to feed five of them on only a thousand crickets a month again... God, remember back when you got your first collared, and thought "How big a deal can buying a few crickets for that little lizard be?" Well, um, let's see, they're basically a huge mouth, a round belly, and very fast legs...
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 2005 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
0.0.2 2009 Eastern Collared hatchlings

LOL! I am one of the few people on the planet that cannot get roaches to thrive, but I am also a southern girl who was conditioned to HATE roaches. I have to admit that I neglect them. I need to start trying harder because I buy 3000 crix a week!

Babies napping after a feeding frenzy

I've heard different schools of thought on how to breed roaches. Interestingly, the hands-off method really does seem to work best. Get a nice tall bin, with very hard plastic. That Rubbermade type stuff tends to get porous when exposed to heat for prolonged periods, and then it becomes climbable. Even when it's smooth, there still tends to be a ledge around the upper rim, and if they can get to that via egg-crate they can still reach the upper crack, so the taller the better. Plus, more margin of error as far as thermal gradient goes- just like with lizards. Perforate the top slightly, add a bunch of vertical egg falts, and put a UTH under one half. Use a butter lid or something as a food dish at the cool end, and feed them an appropriate dry gutload as their main diet. DO NOT MIST. DO NOT PROVIDE WATER, with or without a sponge. DO NOT PROVIDE GEL, except under unusual circumstances when you don't happen to have anything else handy. Their moisture should come from fruits and vegetables, which they will eat quite readily if it is their primary water source, although if the whole setup is muggy they can actually be damned picky. Go heavy on herp-friendly vegs such as zuchini and sweet potato, although sometimes it's kind of creepily fun to watch them go crazy for other favorites, such as banana peels. They don't really like the darker greens, but will devour the darker lettuces- and, yes, old wilted vegies that were originally purchased for the lizards are fine. So is over-ripe fruit. I'm used to my colony and I have a feel for its rythms, so I'll also offer them leftover meat products, but if you're having trouble with yours, don't. I do it as a frugality thing, not as a biological necessity. Also, DO NOT USE SUBSTRATE. And do not let the built-up waste in the bottom collect moisture. An easy way to keep the bottom dry and easy to spot-clean (I have no cleaning schedule, but when the dried stool gets deep enough to be annoying when I try to catch a roach it's time to spot-clean that section. When an egg-flat physically deteriorates, it's time to replace it) is to periodically rotate the bin so that the cool end becomes the warm end and vice versa. A mucky mess quickly becomes dry and granular after a few hours over mild heat. The biggest problems you'll have using the dry-tub system are
a. A higher infant mortaliy rate, but the adults will produce so many anyway that it's not a big deal, and
b. Wing-nibbling, if you guess wrong on how much moist produce to provide. But the wings are just chiton anyway. It's really just cosmetic damage that does not seem to interfere with them doing their roachly tnings, including reproduction.
also, c: there's always the possibility that something bad will get into your colony and you'll have to flush all the bugs and start over, but if you're not gratuitously feeding them weird exotic raw protein sources you ought to be fine.
Just try to give as much produce a day as you can without steaming or sogging things up, skip a day or two when you overdue it, and take the same "generous unless in doubt, in which case skip a day" attitude about dry food, and they'll be fine. I mean, that pretty much exhausts everything I know about roaches, but it works. A lot of the fancier, higher-maintenance styles didn't, so conclude what you will.
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 2005 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
0.0.2 2009 Eastern Collared hatchlings

I liked breeding the roaches, had orange spotted dubia/don't climb. But the one thing I found that was a real bummer was my hatchlings would not go after the baby roaches, they did not move, ( the baby roaches play dead) and the lizard would walk away. I would have to make the babys move each time. So what would happen I would soon find alot of baby roaches under things.

Also some of my collareds would not eat anything bigger than a medium roach,( which was big) and some collareds did not eat them at all. This left me with some large roaches that had to be fed to my Blue tongue skink who soon was bored with them and my large leaftail geckos would eat a few, Panther chameleon would. But for the most part I was not real pleased with what was being eaten as opposed to crickets. Also the large roaches have mostly shell.

I have bred crickets over the years as well, time consuming, lots of containers, heat in the winter, must stay super clean when ya have so many or you get a weird smell. Can't let anything get damp. I thought it was a pain, but with the COST of shipping crickets these days and the amounts I need, I'm thinking about breeding my own again, or trying another type of smaller roach that does not climb.
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PHEve / Eve

You might try discoids, They're faster than dubias, and if a few of them hide they're less of a nibbling danger than my orange-heads. Really, it sounds like we both picked the wrong roach species. I'll switch over eventually, but that raises the question of what to do with all these orange-heads! I figure eventually, despite this year having a low hatch rate, the lizard puppies will pile up enough that I have to rent an expo table anyway (I had a bad enough experience with the parents' delivery that I'm still squeamish about shipping,) and while I'm at it I can sell off the OHRs and switch over to discoids. Discoids have softer, less scratchy legs, too, which my skink will no doubt consider a plus. For now, though, these things do the job. I was experimenting with different types and these just happened to be the ones that I had when I finally figured out how to keep them productive. (Well, OK, I did OK with craniifers and fuscas, too, but the toad was getting way too fat!)
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0.1 2006 Western Hognose (Bebe)
0.1 age unknown Cane Toad (Hengo)
0.1 2005 White-Banded Sheen Skink (Minerva)
1.0 2006 Northern Diamondback Terrapin (Queequeg)
1.0 2006 Madagascan Speckled "Hognose" (Sigmund)
1.0 2008 Bullsnake (Winkle)
1.2 2008 Eastern Collared Lizards (Pancho, Lupe, and Chica)
0.0.2 2009 Eastern Collared hatchlings