Reptile & Amphibian Forums

Man this is scary!

Copy & Paste this link to Read about Lucky Lures Heartbreaking story on bankrupt. This was posted in the Orlando Sentinel & on BeardedDragon.org:

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/local/os-cricket-farm-bankruptcy-20100621,0,4775044.story

**** If this is a plague..... Man we are in trouble!

Does anyone think this is a major threat or just a problem with certain farms?
www.AtlantaBeardedDragons.com

This whole thing does suck, especially for me since I was getting my crickets from Lucky Lure. As far as the "plague" thing, usually that involves the opposite happening with insects.
I doubt it will get to the point of wiping out european house crickets all together, it already hit europe and they survived. From a chameleon keepers perspective crickets should only be one species of several feeder insects utilized as lots of chameleons get bored with being offered only one prey item not to mention they do much better on a diversity of insects. I have had chameleons that wouldn't even take crickets at all in the past.
There are several species of roaches available that you can use as well as silk worms and horn worms and in some states you can get stick insects as well.
I have used wild caught insects forever for all my lizards and it is an excellent resource to utilize. Obviously you want to collect them from an area where there are no pesticides being used.
Most grasshoppers work excellent with the only notable exception I have ever seen being the south eastern lubber grasshopper which is an abnormally large (very abnormally large) and quite toxic species. I have seen a friend's outstelletts chameleon that was being fed these that died from eating them. Considering that they were collected from a suspect area I am not sure if it was from the grasshoppers natural toxicity or from pesticides either way I have stayed away from them. I have utilized every other species of grasshopper in fl other than lubbers and have never had any problems. I also use butterflies and moths with no problems either. I do avoid monarchs, zebra longwings and a type of moth whose name escapes me now that lives here in fl. It has a lot of pink on it's wings and is so distasteful that spiders will throw them out of their webs when they get caught. I can go on and on with this but I will run out of space so I'll stop here. Just remember to think beyond crickets when feeding.