Culturing Pin-Head Crickets

Culturing Pin-Head Crickets

When you start keeping frogs that require small food items such as pinhead crickets or fruit fly's, it is a good idea to start your own cultures for a couple of reasons. Last winter, I lost two of my mantellas because I could not get any food for them, the pet store I was buying the pin-heads from stopped selling them for some reason and I could not find anything to feed my frogs in the middle of January. I also realized that it would be a lot cheaper if I could raise my own crickets so I would have a personal supply of pin-heads for my frogs, instead of buying them from mail order or possibly another pet store. The last good reason I can think of is that you know where those pin-heads have been and how healthy they are, sometimes when you get crickets at the store, they have parasites and you don't even know it, this way, if you keep your cultures clean, you lessen the chance to infect your frogs with various parasites.

I started voulenteering at the National Zoo in Washington DC in the Amazonia Exhibit last June. One of the first things they taught me how to do was to clean the cricket cages and how to take care of the cricket cultures. This is the way I was taught how to do this at the zoo.

At the zoo we have a 70 gallon aquarium with about 500-700 adult crickets in it. Other than the crickets, there is a food pan with cricket meal, egg crates to allow the crickets more space to walk and to make it easier for them to get to the food and a watering container, which is just a bottle with a sponge in the end. The only other thing that is in there is a small cup about 3 inches high and about 4 inches wide, filled about three fourths full of top soil. The egg crates are positioned so they are not touching the watering apparatus but forming a bridge to the soil cup. The cup of soil is where the female crickets lay their eggs in the soil.

Everyday someone has to take all the dead crickets out of the tank and throw them away, change the water and replace the cup of soil with a new one. If you looked at the sides of the cup, you can see hundreds of eggs about a centimeter or two deep in the soil, all around the sides of the cup.

Next, a lid with a few small air holes is placed on top of the cup and a date is put on the side and it is set in a warm dry place for about 2 weeks until the baby crickets hatch and crawl to the surface(if you can keep the tempature at around 80 degrees, it should take 10 days or so). When this happens we take the cup and place it into a rubbermaid bin that is about 15 gallons. Inside the bin, we have the same setup as in the adult cricket cages, except the food has been finely ground and the only cups of soil that are in there are ones with baby crickets emerging from them.

If your like me, you want nothing to do with the noise and smell of adult crickets and the mess that they make, here is a possible solution: If your local pet store sells crickets, ask them if you could place a container of soil in their cricket cages for a day or two, then return to the store and pick up your egg-laiden soil and keep it warm. Most pet stores have no problem with this. Just explain to them what you want to do, be sure to tell them that it wont harm their crickets. You may even want to offer to share the babies with them.