How to Propagate Crickets as Food for Exotic Pets

Video Transcript

" Hi I’m Daniel Keeper owner and operator of Zoo Keeper Exotic Pets in Austin, Texas and on behalf of Expert Village.com; today we will be talking about producing food animals for your exotic pets. The most popular food animal for most lizards in this industry is the common gray cricket. Here is an example of what these crickets look like as adults. The goal here is to go from an adult to a baby then back to an adult. Basically what we do we take adult crickets and we put them in a Tupperware tub that is 16 inches tall or so, so they can hop out. Inside of that tub we put in trays of potting soil. You can use damp sand or vermiculite and as you can see, the female crickets immediately within seconds go to this dirt. It’s a moist soil and immediately begin to lay eggs. We let them lay eggs usually overnight and the next morning what we do is dump this container into a deeper taller container, has less surface area and so the soil remains damp throughout the incubation process. Depending on the temperature, usually you want it between 80 and 92 degrees. Those eggs will hatch out anywhere from 8 to 16 days. What you get when that hatches out is thousands and thousands of pinhead crickets. These crickets can be raised in a container, fed up until the adult size and all sizes in between. That is basically how we get the crickets to reproduce. "