crickets as food

[JackRent]

I am going to get started with some frogs sometime in January and I am pretty clear on fruit fly cultivation. I am curious if you can feed the smallest size crickets that Petco sells mail order. Also can you feed the canned crickets that Exo Terra sells for reptiles ? Petco sells 1000 crickets at a time so I would imagine that would last awhile. The small size by the way is said to be 1/8 of an inch long.

[brettlt]

1000 crickets that small will not really last that long, because they will not stay that size for long. At room temps they will grow into adults within 6 weeks. Depending on what you are feeding, and how many, it may be better to get a smaller quantity.

[zBrinks]

Also, the 'small' size from petco is too large for most darts, at least in my experience. You really want pinhead crickets, and pinhead crickets wont stay pinhead crickets for long.

[KeroKero]

I get "small" crickets weekly... I feed them to my phyllobates terribilis, and occassionally get small enough ones to feed to my anthonyi/tricolor and mantellas. As a general rule tho, only my bicolor (and terribilis if I had them) and my TFs (leucophyllata and reeds) get the small crickets.

How many frogs are you talking about feeding? 1/8th in crickets are already too big for the majority of PDFs (except larger phyllobates and larger epipedobates) as the rest only like true pinheads (from hatching to a couple of days) to one week crickets (pet stores carry 2-3 week old crickets as "smalls"). Crickets have a huge size difference in a short amount of time, something like tripling mass just about every week. You could not feed out more than a few of the crickets before the rest became just too big.

Better way about it... buy a couple winged adults and breed some pinheads. Plenty of threads on it. I'm currently cooking eggs from last weeks' adults

[snake8myelbo]

I work at a petstore and we breed our own pinheads and sell them to the public "aka" dart frog owners :lol: How much does petco sell 1000 for? Damn petco lol.