Dubia Roaches

[Rankins]

Taterbug mentioned water crystals, I have never used them. I'm sure some of the polymer is ingested by the roaches...which is eaten by your reptile. Im not too sure how this could be a good thing.
I just give them a mound of food damp with orange juice. It is true roaches like to pick and choose what they need to eat. Dry mixed food doesn't allow that...but I have probably 50+ lbs of roaches that grew from 50 babies in a little over a year. So the mixed food seems to be doing fine even if its not totally optimal...seems the impact is minimal.

 

[Taterbug]

Regarding water crystals, some more details.

Polyacrylamide cyrstals are considered safe - there are even uses in food and water treatment. It's in cosmetics too.

Acrylamide monomer is a neurotoxin at relatively low doses. This is the stuff that is used to make the polyacrylamide and the catch is two fold.

First. The reaction isn't always 100%. Agricultural applications (like inexpensive miracle grow water crystals) do not have the same quality control measures as food grade ones. This means more unreacted monomer is allowed in the final product. This could be reduced by useing a food grade variant. When I emailed scotts lawn about it their answer was don't feed it to animals and agricultural (gardens) application should be when animal activity is low.

Second. Heat, light, age and "mechanical wear" can degrade the polymer back to the monomer. It's possible that older bags of crystals (since they last so long!) or ones stored improperly may be unheathier to use than new ones.

There are also incidents everynow and then of a dry crustal stuck on a feeder, a baby dragon eats it and they die of complications from the crystal soaking up water inside them

 

[Taffer]

Good points Tater!

When I start robbing the breeding colony for feeders I'll make sure to keep them off of water crystals for several days before feeding them to the dragon to be safe and allow contaminates to filter out of their systems. I think I bought the food rated crystals, but I'll have to go back and check. Although to be honest, why would you use non-food rated on your plants, unless they are non-food plants anyway? Kind of goes back to my previous point...so many people put so much more time, effort and research into what they feed their pets (and their feeder insects) than they do in what they eat themselves.

Anybody heard of any issues doing ~3 days of gut loading on roaches with high calcium food, since it takes about 3 days for everything to process from roaches eating the food to it leaving their digestive tract?

Rankins - I think I found the root cause of my phoid (sp?) fly issue. Too much moisture was right. The analog hydrometer I was using was way, way off. It was reading about 65% humidity, but when I put the new sensor in, the reading went up to about 95% humidity. I stopped misting the inside of the tank and opened up the holes a little more (removed some tape) and the humidity is back down to acceptable levels. I may need to tweak a little more, but I never dreamed that analog hydrometer was that far off. Then again, it was one of those pieces of crap that came with that 'all in one' terrarium kits that the pet store talked my wife into. She hadn't read the information on this site saying what crap they were, and I didn't know she was buying it, so it's my bad. Guess that explains why I saw 0% molting deaths due to the humidity being too low.

 

[Taffer]

This is the post Rankins and I were talking about a few days ago. It has the same name as this thread, but it has tons of useful information and we'd rather keep that thread at the top versus this one. No offense to the OP, but this other thread covers pretty much everything from building your breeding colony bins, heat sources, food, food mixes, and on and on in great detail, including links to some of the products mentioned, including low cost egg crates ($0.28 to $0.38 per egg crate in low bulk) that are made in the factory and then baked, so no salmonella risk, low cost and good shipping containers if you ever wish to sell excess roaches and so on. We may answer duplicate questions, but it is easier to direct people back to the answers in the same thread than hunt each time.


Click Here :arrow: :arrow: :arrow: https://www.beardeddragon.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=76&t=225240

 

[Taterbug]

I think high calcium diets have an impact on reproduction and molting, rather than a toxicity sort of reaction.

Polyacrylamide crystals are used as a soil amendment - it is supposed to help the soil retain moisture for longer. I am terrible at gardening so I never read into it much about how plants may or may not take up the acrylamide monomer. There are a bunch of gardening sites with spook information too, not sure it's that big a deal but putting it directly in the food chain seems... unnessciary.

 

[Rankins]

Yes, I guess I should have clarified my fears of eating the water crystals...it was more towards fears of them absorbing moisture from the crickets, roaches, and dragon leading to dehydration verses any toxicity. But it isn't a natural product anyway and I try to feed my bugs stuff that isn't chemically produced.

 

[Rankins]

Hey Taffer, I was pretty sure the humidity was the likely issue. Glad you figured out yours was way too high...the phorids should disappears fairly quick, they have a short lifespan. The reduced humidity should also limit the mold and mite possibility.

Moving to our past dubia thread to aid in cohesiveness.