How Long Each Feeder Insect Lives (Complete Lifespan & Growth Stage Chart)
If you wanna keep feeder insects, you’ve gotta know insects. Just giving your bugs a place to live and some food to munch on is a great basic gameplan, but what happens when you have too many feeders for your pet? Or even worse, what happens if you don’t have enough? In order to plan a stable colony, you need to know how quick your insects are going to mature, reproduce, and die.
That’s what this article is all about. We’re going to cover feeder insect biology and life cycles, so you can plan a perfect colony that won’t boom and bust. Here’s what you need to know.
Feeder Insect Pros and Cons
While there are tons of feeder insects to choose from, most people go with one of about five. Does that make them the best options? No, not necessarily. But it does mean that they’re tried-and-true, and there is a lot of information out there on how to keep them.
Case and point: crickets. Crickets are commonly regarded as a subpar staple feeder by reptile owners, but they’re still the most common feeder insect on the planet.
Why? Because they reproduce quicker than rabbits. A lot quicker. That means that pet shops can farm them out easily and always have a steady supply on hand. The downsides to crickets are their high fiber content, odor, and tendency to catch colony-wide diseases and die off.
Next up are mealworms and superworms, which are both darkling beetles (family Tenebrionidae). These little guys are cousins, but they have some crucial differences. Mealworms are more fibrous and smaller, but can be kept in the fridge for long periods. This is a nice option if you want to supplement your pet’s diet with something different now and again.
Superworms are more healthy overall, but they have a high fat content which makes them a good supplementary food, not a staple.
Last are the roaches, primarily dubias. Dubias are one of our favorite feeders. They’re very low-maintenance, come in a good range of sizes, provide good protein content, and are terrible at escaping captivity.
How Insect Life Cycles Work
Each of these insects falls into two basic categories. There are insects that have typical life stages separated by a serious physical metamorphosis (think like butterflies). And there are insects that are born from an egg and basically just get bigger until they die.
Both of the darkling beetles (mealworms and superworms) are part of the first category. In fact, the “worm” form we know them for is really just their larval stage. They spend a few months in this stage before pupating and turning into a full-blown beetle. This is the main stage in their life cycle.
Crickets and dubia roaches are part of the second category. They hatch (or are born, in the roach’s case), and get bigger until they reach a maximum size. The development of reproductive maturity isn’t quite as obvious, because they don’t undergo major physical changes when they become reproductive.
Cricket Biology and Life Cycle
Crickets are by far the fastest-growing bugs on this list, and the fastest to reach reproductive maturity. They spend two weeks as eggs, then hatch and quickly start developing. They’re considered juveniles for the first four to six weeks of life, after which point they will start reproducing.
What this means is you can breed a ton of crickets very, very fast. But this is also the biggest issue with keeping them, because they’re prone to overcrowding themselves. This can rapidly increase the humidity in their enclosure, which can in turn spread disease like wildfire and leave your whole colony dead.
So when keeping crickets, your main goal is to keep them clean and keep their numbers down. You might have to cull them occasionally if they’re reproducing too fast. That is, if you can’t find something to feed them to instead. You’ll also have to introduce new colony members from time to time, or else they can become inbred and die off.
Darkling Beetle Biology and Life Cycle
The darkling beetles (mealworms and superworms) are pretty similar in terms of life cycle and total life expectancy. They’re eggs for a few weeks, then larvae for a few months (up to six). During this time, they’ll grow a lot and spend most of their time substrate feeding.
When it’s time to pupate, they’ll isolate themselves and burrow before turning into a pupa (kind of like a butterfly chrysalis). They pupate over two weeks or so, and then emerge as beetles. Their exoskeletons take a while to harden and turn black, but at this point they’re fully mature reproductive beetles, complete with wings. They will live as beetles for another six to twelve months.
Dubia Roach Biology and Life Cycle
Dubia roaches are about as simple as they come. Their mothers carry their eggs inside their bodies, so they actually give live birth. From this point, they grow until they’re mature and start reproducing quickly. Because the females carry their young, they can only give birth once every two months or so.
In order to control their population size, you can pick out the female roaches to feed to your pet. This will leave a few females whose main job is to reproduce, and will do so at their own pace.