Excellent good to know, I had a sense about that, she seemed to pity the hydei and appears to be getting bored with them as if they are way too easy to prey on for her lol. As I have just gotten used to her jumpiness and excitable attitude, how do I go about isolating the cricket? She just ate, and there are 1 or 2 more flies in her current container. Right now she is full and I know this cricket will be her biggest meal yet. This means I must wait a few hours and until then I would like to transfer her to the new enclosure first. How can I adequetly move to cricket? Shall I feed it?
Personally I just grab crickets with my 10" tweezers/tongs and can move them anywhere I want, but that comes with experience and often a few attempts anyway. Likely the best solution is to place the new habitat with the cricket outside, or in the middle of your floor away from places for it to hide, as it may jump out. Open the lid enough to put your hand in the habitat, and use a empty paper towel or toilet paper roll, and try to slide the cricket into that.
If your not having any luck securing the cricket, you can also try to capture it with a clean yogurt container or such too. Then place the lid on the container, or cover it with something to prevent it escaping - with the paper rolls you can just crimp the ends of the roll by smashing with your hands. Then simply dump the cricket into another container until you feed it to your girl.
Of course the simplest method would be to leave it in the current container until it's time to feed your girl, then put your girl in the new container and she will capture it. Once it's gone then you can setup the habitat how you want.
If your mantid isn't hand tamed yet, you can transfer her using a small stick or dowel rod, they easily climb on when it's placed near/under them (especially if they are trying to get out of a habitat anyway).
The only other method I can think of would be to open both your mantid's lid and the cricket's, and pour the cricket in with your girl and quickly put the lid on. I've done it myself before, but crickets will tend to try jumping when they get near a container opening and may make it onto the floor/table instead.
Indeed! I actually didn't notice it was in there until I was getting home. Honestly, I live in a somewhat rural area in Utah, and It was a rinky dink local pet store on main street. The only guy working there had a face on that said 'I'm having a bad day', and he had just finished telling the guy in front of me in line that he was covering for someone that didn't show up today. Now that I think of it, the guy in front of me was actually buying crickets!
Perhaps they had a few escape then from the other guy. If the store clerk was in a bad mood anyway it's hard to say if he had one climb on his arm, slip out of the bag/box as it wasn't secured properly, or maybe earlier on it escaped and made it into the habitat you bought. Likely it had something to do with the guy buying them, but we'll never know what.
I use to have a local pet store that always had loose crickets, and they were unconcerned about it. Whenever asked or informed about it, they would respond it keeps their store's loose pet cats busy and the crickets never last long.
