Keeping Crickets
Acheta domesticus

Sam Forster

The traditional food item offered to most captive amphibians and small reptiles is the cricket. The following is a description of the technique used to maintain and feed these insects to your frogs.

Housing:
Housing cricket is a relatively simple task with most people simply leaving them in the plastic containers in which they were purchased, however this limits the number you can easily store at one time and makes breeding impractical. Another option is the polystyrene boxes used by greengrocers. The advantages of these are they are free, already insulated and have tight fitting lids. To prepare these boxes you must cut holes in the top to allow sufficient air circulation and add newspaper or other cover to provide shelter for the crickets. Although this is a viable alternative, and more suitable than the plastic containers the polystyrene tends to degrade overtime and boxes must be continually replaced. Furthermore the lower temperature of these enclosures appears to decrease the adult size, and thus food value of these insects. The final, and my preferred approach is the use of wooden boxes with inbuilt heat lights, specifically built for the task of housing food insects. The designs for building a box of this type can be found here.

Conditions:
Crickets prefer to be kept at a constant temperature of 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit) with a 12 hour day/night cycle. As previously mentioned, it is also beneficial to use newspaper, shredded paper or a similar material to provide areas for the crickets to take refuge during the day.

Feeding:
Many people complain of a particularly foul odour associated with crickets. In my experience this odour is most commonly associated with crickets fed on a diet of fruit and vegetables. For this reason crickets being grown to food size, or stored should not be fed fruit, but should be provided with water, through the use of a clean, damp sponge, and fed bran, cereal or dried rabbit food. As described in the article on gutloading, all insects should be fed with fruit before being presented to the frogs. This will decrease the odours commonly associated with crickets, while maintaining the benefit of the vegetable matter being passed to the frogs.