Cricket Death Rate

[z71]

On August 16, I received an order for 1500 3/8th inch crickets. They are kept in a 10 gallon tank with everything a cricket could ever want - plenty of fresh egg crate, cricket chow, fresh water crystals, greens, carrots, etc. We even cleaned the tank this past weekend. They live better than I do!

I've been keeping track of exactly how many we feed at each meal. after two weeks the supply is running low and we are going to end having fed about 750 live crickets to our dragon of the 1500 we ordered.

Now obviously I didn't personally count how many we actually received. The order was from Ghans.

So my question is - does a 50% die-off sound about right after two weeks? It seems awfully high to me so that's why I'm asking.

 

[Claudiusx]

No that seems pretty high, especially after only two weeks.

Did you personally make the cricket chow? Do you know what is in it?

-Brandon

 

[Snowball0807]

Maybe a bit high, but not by much. Crickets are just not good feeders for that reason only. They die when you look at them wrong. Is it also possible that you accidentally threw away some, killed some, etc. when you cleaned the tank?

 

[Gail]

To me, thats a really high death rate. When I kept crickets I only had a few die every week, maybe 10 or so.

 

[randommonks]

Maybe the virus?

http://www.ghann.com/faq.cfm

 

[z71]

Cricket Chow is Ghan's brand and I don't think we lost many during our cleaning. That was done on Saturday and at that point, there were only about 200 or so still alive so we didn't have that may to lose.

My guess is it's probably a bit higher than normal, but cricket death rates are not good anyways. In order to know how many die you've really got to track them and I doubt many people do it.

In the past couple of months, I've been ordered 1000 crickets and they've been lasting about 3 weeks (baby dragon wasn't eating as much). Death rates still seemed pretty high - that's why I wanted to track them this time.

I'm going to try switching to 100% reptiworms. He seems to really like them and when you factor the full costs of crickets - shipping, maintenance, death rates, etc), reptiworms really aren't that much more expensive.

I'm eventually going to move to roaches but I just haven't had time to get everything set up.

 

[z71]

I've been racking my brain trying to figure out what might have happened. After going over everything we did, I'm starting to question the method my wife used to clean the cricket tank. We keep baby wipes next to our BD enclosure to clean up poop, cricket parts, etc. She used the baby wipes to clean out the cricket tank and didn't rinse afterwards.

I'm leaning toward the baby wipes as the potential killer. Do you think some sort of soap or residue left by those wipes would be strong enough to kill crickets? I'd consider baby wipes to be pretty benign, but it's possible...

Any thoughts?

 

[Claudiusx]

It is possible, or the fumes.

Did you clean out dead crickets everyday? I don't mean wiping with baby wipes but did you remove the dead crickets each day?
How well is your tub ventilated?

-Brandon

 

[z71]

Dead crickets were removed with tweezers but not on a regular basis.

10 gallon tank with the entire top screened. I'd think they'd get plenty of circulation.

 

[Claudiusx]

Hi there,

That could be your problem.
You MUST remove dead crickets everyday. The reason is that the dead crickets give off a fume that actually kills other crickets. So one dead cricket can start a massive chain reaction of more dead crickets who kill more crickets.

Another possibility is you are not buying from a healthy supply. Many cricket suppliers are being hit pretty hard with a virus that is killing off crickets pretty fast.

-Brandon

 

[z71]

That's news to me! Thanks for replying Brandon. I have never heard that before and will definitely do a better job of removing dead crickets in the future.

 

[Claudiusx]

Hopefully it works out better for you the next time then!

-Brandon