Heating cricket keeper

[privet01]

You mention locust.... what kind? Never heard of or thought about locust for frog/toad food.

However I find regular crickets pretty easy to raise and as interesting to mess with as my FBT's. The only issue is you have to do it "big". It's virtually impossible to reliably breed just a few. I'd say, IMO of course, that at least a population of 200plus needs to be maintained to be continuously sustainable. Three to four of those big rubbermaid or sterilite storage boxes work great if you have room in an outbuilding or garage. They only have a six to eight week life cycle so you are always starting a new batch every other week or so. And then you'll have to learn to deal with "cricket genocide" as it would be too big an impact on your local environment to release the hundreds that will get too big for feeders.

Oh.. as far as using a heat mat.... that's pretty much your call. May work fine, maybe not. You have to assess your liability if it should catch fire and burn your place down.

With crickets cooler temps slows down their growth. But I don't let mine get below 60F in the winter, and in the summer it is what it is..... about 90Fto 95F right now in the storage room off the garage where I keep mine. Never played around with trying to make any particular brood last longer as it's so easy just to gather more eggs and start a new brood.

[jasonm96]

not quite sure on what kind, it's just the standard ones in the pet stores over here. it's for my pacman, it's the only thing that gets a good feeding response. i read somewhere that horned frogs eat locust in the wild but not entirely sure if that's true. the locust diet's just fine, i take care of my live food like i would any other living animal and have had no problems with my crickets reproduce for me often. it's just locust that seem to be dying off, so thought it could be that they could do with being warmer. don't think i'll use the heat mat then, might put it on top of my beardie cage, see if that will heat them up enough. thanks for your help