Re: Culturing Crickets - Care and Breeding of the Common House Cricket
Another great article !
Thumbs up
I think crickets are one of the best food sources around and highly underestimated.
The most important thing in the recipe is protein, lots and lots of protein.
This is what crickets like best.
When you give to little of this, they will start eating eacother because a cricket is full of proteins itself.
The more proteins available, the more they breed.
When proteins get abudant, they start eating eachother in order to get it.
Clever mechanism of nature
About the sound,
i must say i stopped feeding the domestic crickets for various reasons.
-They do make a irritating sound, at least for me they do.
-And i heard more then once they started to dine on the animals they are food for when they are asleep. Glad i never witnessed it myself, but i saw pictures, and it isn't looking nice i can tell
My guess is that such an animal is already weakend, but just to be better safe then sorry
-Domestic crickets can last inside you're house and even breed when escaped,
Therefore my choice of cricket is the steppe cricket(Gryllus assimilis) oten recalled to as the brown field cricket.
The benefits in my opinion are:
-They are less aggresive then the domestic cricket, banded cricket or black field cricket
-Makes the softest chirp of all the species named.(wich in my case is most important)
-Don't become a plague as often due to their higher temperature needs to breed and even survive.
-Are slower and less jumpier then most, certainly less then the "normal" domestic ones
-Contain more meat since they become a little bigger and rounder as the other species(except the black one but those ruin this benefit by their sound)
-Research in Germany showed they contain the most nutritions of all species and in a better balance.
Downside is they breed not as fast since they got a relative long lifecycle.
They reach maturaty later then the domestic cricket.
Breeding goes trough the same principals as what is already mentioned for the "normal" crickets.
As i mentioned they like it warm.
Around 30 degrees Celcius (86 Fahrenheit) or a little higher will do great.
Eggs will have the best hatching rate at 30 degrees Celcius.
Note that they need water available at all times, they can't do without as long as the domestic ones can.
A nice tip for the other ones out there, getting nuts of a breeding group of males.
Try to sift out the males and keep a couple of them with more females then they can handle.
Doing so, they won't take the time to chirp since they are way to busy
That's no joke, it realy helps a lot.
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