Roaches or crikets

wow

New Member
i was wondering if roaches are a good staple diet becase they ar easyer to keep than cricets and they dont smell and dont make noise also the tuskin roach has more meat than shell and it does not climb and cant fly
 
Wow, you could be a roach sales person.

I keep roaches and really agree with everything you just said. However, they are also breeding machines and creep a lot of people out. A lot can climb and fly. I have blaptica dubias, and despite my best efforts, I have found a few in the house.

Heika
 
Howdy,

Roaches make great feeders. Easy to easy to raise, breed, gutload and feed-off. Like many feeders though, they may fall out of favor with your chameleon. My three chameleons currently will not touch a roach and its been that way for months. Meanwhile, the roaches continue to multiply. I gave away at least a hundred of the Blaptica Dubia (Guyana Orange
Spotted Roach) last week and a friend gave away many hundreds of her lobster roaches at the same time. Once you get a colony going, you'll never have to buy one again. Unlike crickets, these insects rarely die while being raised. Before feeding-off a roach, I always remove the 4 back legs. This is to reduce the chances of an accidental escape (slows them down a bit) and to make them a bit safer to eat. Even after those legs are removed, they don't die from it. I have found them weeks later doing just fine. A single female Dubia will produce about 30 nymphs every couple of months(?) I started out with less than a dozen adults which took a few months to produce their first batches. I let many of those grow to maturity and reproduce. It took something like 6 months to get the colony fully established from that small quantity but only took about $10 worth of roaches too! I feed them a variety of leftover fruits and veggies and constantly feed them W.E.R. gutload. For the past 6+ months, I no longer use any substrate; just egg crate. They might produce more efficiently if I had substarte again but I once used wheat bran and eventually had grain mite problems (BIG PROBLEMS!) Dubia don't climb glass but can get too big to feed-off too. Lobsters climb glass but make great feeders since they don't get too big for a typical adult veiled or panther-sized chameleon.

Chameleon keepers who live within driving distance of Manhattan Beach, CA and want to try roaches can contact me about picking-up a small starter colonies worth for free. Sorry, no shipping. Here's a great guy to buy roaches from if you're looking for other species: http://www.blaberus.com/


A few photos:

Madagascars (no longer raise them):
Madagascar1.jpg


Nymphs getting their first and only feeding from mom:
Yummy.jpg


A few months old:
Molting1.jpg


Lobsters and leftover ABC corn cob:
Corn-on-the-cobLovers.jpg


Love that W.E.R. Gutload:
LobsterRoaches.jpg
 
tuskin roaches are the same sise as lobsters but they can not fly or klimb so i think i will start off a coline of them also i think there cool not gross i might get a hisser for a pet they can live for 2 years if kept right a good site i just found is new york worms i dont no the web addres but if you look up feeder roaches on msn its like half way down the first page thanks for the suggestions tho i made the criket box from the chameleon jornals to keep them in

you can allso reduce the temp to stop them breading
 
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that site is great thanks for telling wow that guy must have thousands of roaches
 
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