crickets

[Ryan]

Petco cultures stink whenever i buy them, because the flies fly! I never buy their cultures anymore.

[Arklier]

Petco cultures have worked for me, but I mostly use them just in a pinch, or if I want to start up a new set of cultures. It's too expensive to ship the cultures most of the time, so I buy the medium seperately (it's dry goods and can go normal ground shipping) and then get my starter culture from the pet store. BTW, Petsmart sells D. hydei, so my hydei cultures orginally came from there.

[Ryan]

i got mel from them in a green container, i once got heidei wich were great. But the mel is wet sucked.

[Arklier]

The problem with crickets is that (provided they don't die) they quickly grow to a size where the frogs can't eat them. I've seen plenty of posts here and on frognet about crickets that escaped being eaten and grew to maturity in the tank. If you don't feed them out fast enough or the frogs don't eat them all (and you don't have something bigger that eats crickets), it can be a real problem because you've wasted your money, and huge crickets can stress the frogs out.

[Ed Martin]

Here is a picture of a p.terribilis with a prolapse. Prolapses can be caused
by a number of things and impaction of food and non-food items is one cause.

http://www.martin-spot.com/our_frogs/im ... olapse.jpg

This frog was diagnosed with having a calcium deficiency that caused the
prolapse. But there may have been other contributing factors, such as too
large of food items.

Many of the larger breeders and hobbyists feed crickets with no ill effects
but crickets are expensive in the long run, especially when you only have a few "dart sized" frogs to feed. If you can pick them up 1,000 pinheads costs $10 - $12, but in 2 weeks those pinheads are getting big enough that the might be too big for your darts. So unless you have a decent number of frogs, or something else to eat the larger crickets you might end up getting stuck with crickets that are too large. I feed pinhead crickets to my dart frogs, the 3 - 5 week old crickets to my b. orientalis and leopard geckos and the adult crickets to my bearded dragons. But I raise a lot of FF's as a staple for the darts. You could use the big crickets as breeders, but it is at least twice as hard and 10x more noisy than raising fruit flies. It is so much cheaper to raise flies, I suggest that you give it a try again. The recipes and techniques mentioned on this site will allow you to raise the flies for pennies in old mayo jars, water bottles, etc. There are some good recipies and techniques posted in this thread and on this site

Ed

[Rain_Frog]

Really? Hydei at Petsmart? Does it actually say? If I can avoid paying shipping (since I'm good at homemade cultures) I definitely want a hydei culture around.

[Arklier]

Around here at least, Petsmart gets their FFs from Timberline Fisheries Co. They come in plastic vials with foam stoppers and are packaged on an open card that shows small reptiles and amphibians (including a PDF or mantella of some kind). The vials have a sticker on them that plainly said Drosophilia hydei sturdivant (flightless). It is very obvious that the flies are hydei, being several times bigger than melanogaster and having the longer generation time. Timberline offers both D. melanogaster and D. hydei vials on their web site, but AFAIK Petsmart only stocks hydei. You can get them off Timberline's web site for $7.50 per vial ($6 if you buy 2 or more) plus shipping, but since you can buy them for $5 at Petsmart, it's cheaper to just buy them at the store.

The vials are apparently not a big seller in most areas, so the vials may have hung on the rack for quite some time. They have bright blue medium (due to the mold inhibitor Timberline uses), so look for ones that have medium that is slightly moist with no mold. Don't worry if you see a lot of dead adult flies in the vial if the medium still looks good, they will have laid eggs in the medium. Here's Timberline's web page on FFs:

http://www.timberlinefisheries.com/fruit_fly.html

[Rain_Frog]

I would like to comment, Timberline is a great place to order live food. I used to order bulk food for my African clawed frogs (which I froze), and they have great pricing...all except for the flies. Compared to what you pay for from specialty fruit fly places like Ed's Fly meat. I haven't ordered from Timberline in a while. Food ordering is still quite expensive.