Cricket question

[leela]

i was looking at my crickets today and i noticed on some of them that in between the two "tail like things" on the bum their was a longer darker spur. What is this??

 

[Chameleons Northwest]

That is the female's ovipositor. She sticks this in soil to lay her eggs. That is how you tell the males from the females, as the males don't have one. The ovipositor starts out short and grows longer. Once it is long, and the males are mature enough to chirp, then you can breed your crickets. If you don't plan to breed them, though, just feed them out. A word of caution, however: very mature crickets have spiny back legs that can get caught in a chameleon's throat and cause problems, infection, even death. You can look at the crickets and tell whether their back legs have become too spiny (or thorny). What you do then is the catch the cricket in a pair of tweezers, or tongs, and cut off the large back legs. Then feed them to your chameleon. They will still be able to move about the cage pretty well, even without those back legs.