I think that leaving geckos in an enclosure with 500 crickets is a potential disaster. - possibly stress out the animals with so many crickets crawling all over them - possibly have the crickets inflict physical harm to the geckos
Crickets can be pretty low maintenance. What do you do with the 8 dozen a week from Petco? Do you feed these out directly to the geckos? Do you first gut load for a few days and then feed out? If you already have them in a 55 gallon with egg crates, then it should be just a matter of getting a large tub (1 liter) and then shake them out into this tub. Caught too many? Shake some out. Too few? Shake some more in. This way you have them in a relatively small tub, you can administer vitamin/mineral/calcium supplements easily (shake and bake method). Doing maintenance with crickets in a 55 gallon is easy too, just shake them all out, sweep the debris to one end and remove, put in fresh egg cartons, food and water and you are done. I used to volunteer at the National Zoos Amazonia exhibit and they used this system effectively. Question - is it touching the crickets that is the underlying problem? Yuri H Silver Spring, MD > OK...question for you all. > > I've been in reptiles for 15 years however am fairly new to cricket > eating animals. I have finally established my leopard gecko colony and > have decided to change over from 8 dozen crickets a week from Petco to > 500 delivered via the mail. When I received them, I dumped the 500 in a > 55 gallon tank along with egg cartons to hide in and food and a watering > system. > > Then I thought...now what? How am I supposed to catch the 8 dozen I > need a week for feeding? > > So...I've decided to stay with the Petco system for now...however, I > still have these 500 crickets to deal with. > > Therefore...I've decided to take about a half dozen of my really good > eating youngsters and put them in the tank and just let them gorge. Of > course I would never do this with mice/rats and snakes which I've dealt > with in the past, but does anyone see any concern with this idea? > > Thanks...I appreciate the advice. > > --Stacy > > ________________________________________________________________ > The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! > Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! > Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today! > _______________________________________________ > Global Gecko Association > http://www.gekkota.com > Classifieds > http://www.gekkota.com/cgi-gekkota/classifieds.cgi > gecko mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://lists.gekkota.com/mailman/listinfo/gecko _______________________________________________ Global Gecko Association http://www.gekkota.com Classifieds http://www.gekkota.com/cgi-gekkota/classifieds.cgi gecko mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.gekkota.com/mailman/listinfo/gecko
