Jodokohajjio
Well-known member
I'm a college student, but on breaks I work part-time at a pet store (Complete Petmart) that supplies crickets. The crickets my store carries are supplied by a company called "Top Hat" and I believe they sell some other feeder insects as well.
The crickets we carried were pretty hearty I'd say, but I think when they are shipped in mass to petstores like that, there's a good chance of high mortality rates. We probably lost at least 10% of whatever we ordered during the time that they were kept in the store. When it was cold outside, it often occured that entire shipments of crickets were dead upon arrival. The mortality rates of surviving crickets were also naturally much higher in the winter because of this.
I'd take this stuff into account, and if you are concerned about getting store-bought crickets, keeping them for a day wouldn't be a bad idea. Make sure that aside from food and water, however, you also have somewhere for them to hide (we typically used egg carton, but just about anything will do). If they do not have somewhere to hide, they seem to get stressed out, and I've even seen cases of cannibalism when this happens.
Also be sure that they cannot drown in their water source! An easy feeding/watering method is to buy the gelatin food that they have at most retail petstores. I forget the name of the particular food we carried, but it had the consistency of jello and would provide both food and water for the crickets without risk of drowning. Alternatively, you could slice a fresh potato in half and that would do the same thing (provide food and water), but would probably not provide much nutritional value for the mantids.
At my store, we had a waterbottle/trough with a sponge in the trough, and we would feed the crickets dog/cat food as a staple. To gutload them, we would add in a bunch of tropical fish flaked food (which they readily ate) and then feed them to the store reptiles/amphibians. This would be an ideal setup, but if this is going to be a one-time only thing, I would stick with the minimum stuff unless you have the fish food and watterbottle handy.
The crickets we carried were pretty hearty I'd say, but I think when they are shipped in mass to petstores like that, there's a good chance of high mortality rates. We probably lost at least 10% of whatever we ordered during the time that they were kept in the store. When it was cold outside, it often occured that entire shipments of crickets were dead upon arrival. The mortality rates of surviving crickets were also naturally much higher in the winter because of this.
I'd take this stuff into account, and if you are concerned about getting store-bought crickets, keeping them for a day wouldn't be a bad idea. Make sure that aside from food and water, however, you also have somewhere for them to hide (we typically used egg carton, but just about anything will do). If they do not have somewhere to hide, they seem to get stressed out, and I've even seen cases of cannibalism when this happens.
Also be sure that they cannot drown in their water source! An easy feeding/watering method is to buy the gelatin food that they have at most retail petstores. I forget the name of the particular food we carried, but it had the consistency of jello and would provide both food and water for the crickets without risk of drowning. Alternatively, you could slice a fresh potato in half and that would do the same thing (provide food and water), but would probably not provide much nutritional value for the mantids.
At my store, we had a waterbottle/trough with a sponge in the trough, and we would feed the crickets dog/cat food as a staple. To gutload them, we would add in a bunch of tropical fish flaked food (which they readily ate) and then feed them to the store reptiles/amphibians. This would be an ideal setup, but if this is going to be a one-time only thing, I would stick with the minimum stuff unless you have the fish food and watterbottle handy.
