Pet store or online crickets

Any opinion on whether I should buy my new baby panther's crickets from the pet store or online?

Do I just chuck them in the cage or should I try to get them up near the cham?

Should I use a tweezer to get a feeling for how many he eats?

Thanks!
Terri and my soon to be delivered Nicodemayo stubby tailed son of yoda. His name is Urlich the Destroyer

I find it cheaper to buy in bulk online... 500 crickets for $15 i think it is.... where it is $0.08 at the petstore ($0.08 X 500 = $40) If you buy 3/4 size or smaller the crickets will live longer too.

I just throw my crickets in the cage..4 or 5 at a time . a few of my chams will eat out of my hand.. but sometimes chams are too shy to do that. You can also cup feed..

Is that your only choice? I dont think it matters, but expect certain quality. The crickets should be active and look healthy, mortality should be low (a few in several hundred ) on delievery.
Eitherway, you should gutload them before feeding, to increase nutritional content for the chameleon.

You can just chuck a few in, say 10-12 small cricks, it should consume those in a day.
you can re-catch any left over so they dont annoy or begin to eat the skin of your sleeping cham. Eventually you will discover a nice balance where he consumes all you put in each day. You can try bowl feeding crickets but without alargish design ,the silly things jump straightout. Bowl feeding is great for other feeder insects though, like worms, roaches etc.

LOL you will quickly find handling crickets with tweezers a Riot! But it does get too tedious. No need to count really, little chams grow incredibly fast and eat much more to match the growth rate!

thanks, guys!

I see a bunch of questions here as you look like a new cham owner.

I'm also going to base my ansers on the fact that you are getting a baby.
(something around 10-16 weeks old...and realy small, say 2" nose to vent...tail not included)


you should be feeding something around 8-12 crickets per day.
half in the morning, the other half in the evening.
you will need to feed other insects too like phoenix worms...maybe half what you feed in crickets (4-6 per day, on the days you don't feed crickets).

crickets can be "cup" fed, and I do have a cup regardless that I almost never use it.
I personaly feed "dusted" crickets by hand in a small cup, or I hand feed them by holding one at a time with my fingers.
my baby already knows this hand feeding cup and goes crazy fast to the frount of the cage ready to eat the second he sees it.
lately, I have been taking this cup and putting it up against the screen of the cage to release one cricket at a time, so they start to crawl upwards on the screen....my baby goes nuts with this type of "free range" feeding.
you could also just "dump" them on the bottom and they will climb up the screen for your baby to eat as well....but they can also get wet on the bottom of the cage between mistings, and drown, so I don't do this anymore.
I only "cup feed" (not hand feed with a cup) when I don't have time, and just dump them in.

phoenix worms don't need to be dusted and should be put in his feeding cup.


now, there are some great places to buy crickets online.
you'll need 1/4" crickets, and lots of them.
some of them will grow, so feed off the larger ones first if posable.

yes you can buy some crickets from your local petco/petsmart or petland discount. yet they are normaly 10 cents per, plus tax.
you have to wiegh just what is cheaper in the end.

I would advise that you don't buy in bulk. say 1000 crickets, as they will grow faster then you can feed them off and then you'll be stuck with crickets that are too large to feed.


above all, please read alot of posts on feeding and dusting.
if you have any more questions please just ask us....or you can PM me.

good luck,
Harry

edit: I see you already got some good advice as I type way too slow, but if you have more questions, please ask.

Personally, I don't trust the pet stores and purchase mine on line.

i would only order crickets online, the ones form pet stores are not fed correctly if ay all. I order from Ghann's, they send healthy gut loaded crickets. You should also ask Nic what size and how many the baby is eating, also what besides crickets he was feeding. Nic is a really nice guy he will help you get the little one squared away.

defintley check out online options, i definitley do off the internet.. i go to the cricketsdirect.com... you can get

250- for 9.75
500- for 10.00
1000- for 10.50

they also sell meal worms, superworms ,giant meal worms, and wax worms in the bulks and all for great prices .. you just have to take care all of the feeders because they need to stay healthy so i have one of those plastic garbage trash cans, and i throw all my crickets in there.. and i make my own water crystals also, you can get water crystals by the ounces for 95. ounce which is awesome if you decide to get feeders by the bulk.. you keep them healthy.. i get my water crystals from aaronpauling.com.. check it out.. so make you own water crystals, and i put cricket feed in there.. and throw some egg cartons in there and your set since they cant climb out of the garbage can, and you'll also notice they breed.. so for 500 crickets, when you done you get like an extra couple 100 or so, its definitley the cheapest .. other websites worth checking out are:

mulberry farms
carolina pet supply
mantis place

I purchase crickets from a local pet store (a good store), but crickets only make up a portion (less than half) of what the chameleons eat. I breed most of the other insects. I bowl feed most of the time (and crickets dont escape if you do this correctly). Its important to gutload and calcium dust crickets.

I have bought crickets at a local Petsmart for awhile. They use a decent gutload and a bulk gelatin as a water source. I only have a few reptiles to feed. Has been easy and the place is a short walk from home.

I did buy crickets on-line. It is definitely cheaper. My only issue was the small crickets I ordered turned out to be large adult ones and so I used them as the start of a breeding colony. I now have many, many, many cricket hatchlings starting to grow.

I like to hand feed my cham worms and cup feed him crickets to regulate his intake. He just decided he likes big crickets. I simply place up to 3 in a small plastic deli container, dust and either set the cup down in a spot he visits roaming the cage, or I hold the cup while he is perched and let him come over and zap them.

There are some neat containers folks on the site have made to feed their crickets to their chams. The milk jug/screen ones look like a good option for me now that Flash wants bigger crickets.

Good Luck with your stubby-tail. They all looked beautiful.

If you only have one Cham I would buy from the petstore. The more crickets you have, the more the smell, resulting in more cleaning. A pet store cricket comes from the same cricket ranch you are buying from, BOTH need to be hydrated and fed before feeding to your Chams. I have found by using hornworms, silkworms, roaches, superworms and wild caught insects, my cricket numbers have gone down significantly. My wife appreciates not finding the escaped ones!

Nick