Gular Edema and Crickets

jajeanpierre

Chameleon Enthusiast
I've found a definite relationship between certain shipments of crickets and edema in my wild caught quads. I've changed suppliers at the recommendation of another quad breeder.

Normally, I buy new crickets and then keep them a minimum of a week feeding good food. I've found that even two weeks after giving certain crickets only really good, whole foods they can still cause edema.

I ended up running out of crickets waiting for the temps to drop enough to get a shipment here live. They arrived today.

I'm running really low on safe bugs.

The new crickets are on grass with fresh fruit. I'll feed them Cricket Crack later today after they've filled up on grass.

Can I use them tomorrow? Or should I wait longer? Suggestions please. I'm not very happy with myself for cutting it so so close.
 
I usually keep the 'newbies' a week before feeding. But, I am like conspiracy theory paranoid. I believe the golden rule is 24 hours, so maybe 48 hours just to be safe.
 
Normally, I buy new crickets and then keep them a minimum of a week feeding good food. I've found that even two weeks after giving certain crickets only really good, whole foods they can still cause edema.

I can believe that especially with the larger sizes. If they have been fed a commercial chicken food diet their whole lives or whatever, their nutritional makeup will be different and the larger they get, the more their bodies have been "built" with whatever diet they have been fed and the less their bodies still have left that can be "built" on a new diet.

gutloading is an OK concept, but there is more to it than what an insect ate only recently.
 
Janet,
It doesn't seem to matter how long I feed my crickets quality foods, if my quads diet consists mostly of crickets they develop some degree of gular edema. When I change their diet to mostly silk worms, dubia, snails, soldier fly larvae, and whatever I can catch wild the edema slowly disappears over 2-4 weeks. I'm sure if I continued crickets as their primary source of nutrition the edema would become severe. Edema is just water retention, it is the miner's canary as to what is going on internally. Whatever they feed the crickets at the commercial cricket factories isn't that big of a concern, as most crickets are raised for fish bait, no matter what they say in their sales blurb.
Quads seem especially sensitive, commercial crickets don't seem to bother a lot of other cham species.
 
Janet,
It doesn't seem to matter how long I feed my crickets quality foods, if my quads diet consists mostly of crickets they develop some degree of gular edema. When I change their diet to mostly silk worms, dubia, snails, soldier fly larvae, and whatever I can catch wild the edema slowly disappears over 2-4 weeks. I'm sure if I continued crickets as their primary source of nutrition the edema would become severe. Edema is just water retention, it is the miner's canary as to what is going on internally. Whatever they feed the crickets at the commercial cricket factories isn't that big of a concern, as most crickets are raised for fish bait, no matter what they say in their sales blurb.
Quads seem especially sensitive, commercial crickets don't seem to bother a lot of other cham species.


That. I've always noticed my Quads need to be monitored on a cricket diet. House files and silks have been a constant diet for mine and the combo of feeders has left me with no real issues to speak of.
 
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