How to Get Crickets to Grow Faster
Crickets are the most common feeder insects out there. Beginners primarily start with crickets before moving onto a different feeder, like dubia roaches or superworms. Crickets can still be reliable and are moderately nutritious. But they can take up to two months to reach full size, which can be difficult if you need to feed more than one reptile.
In this article, we’ll talk about how to maximize the output of your cricket colony. In particular, we’ll talk about how to speed up your crickets’ metabolism and get them to grow as quickly as possible.
Let’s get to it.
How to Set Up a Cricket Colony
The main key to setting up a healthy cricket colony long-term is to be picky about the kind of crickets you use. You typically find brown house crickets (Acheta domesticus) in the pet store. But this species is very high in fiber, prone to colony-wide disease outbreaks, and also stinks to high heaven.
Brown House Crickets Keep Disease Out
If you want to start a cricket colony (especially a large one), we recommend using banded crickets (Gryllodes sigillatus) instead. Banded crickets produce much less ammonia in their waste, which cuts down on the smell and also helps control the humidity inside the colony.
This will keep things cleaner, avoiding disease. Beyond that, most of the diseases that affect brown house crickets, like iridovirus and and cricket paralysis virus, don’t affect banded crickets. Banded crickets are slightly more active, and have about the same nutritional value.
As we’ll see, keeping your crickets alive long-term is your first concern in maximizing your colony’s output. So if you can, go with a cricket that’s going to have fewer health problems.
Setting Up a Habitat
Habitat-wise, crickets are one of the more complex species to keep. You will need to give them a kind of vivarium, similar to the one you keep your pet in, with substrate and a water source. Plastic storage tubs work well for the container, but beyond that, it depends who you ask.
Substrate and Water
Most people swear by something dry and absorbent for substrate, like vermiculite. You can also use paper towels if you’re on a budget. You’ll also need egg cartons for hides. All of this stuff will get soiled and shredded fast, so keep an eye on it. You will need to do daily cleanings to keep your colony healthy.
For water, you’ll need a shallow dish of some kind full of citrus fruits or water crystals. Crickets can drown very easily, so if you do use water, just use a little, and fill their water dish with rocks or gravel so that they can’t submerge in it.
How to Get Crickets to Grow Faster
Getting crickets to grow as fast as possible is all about meeting their needs perfectly in a clean, stress-free environment. Like all insects, crickets need a specific mix of heat, moisture, and nutrition to be healthy. Dialing these things in and maintaining them consistently is the biggest challenge in getting your crickets to grow and reproduce faster.
Climate Conditions
Both brown house crickets and banded crickets are native to the subtropical forests of Southwest Asia. So these are the conditions you’re trying to mimic in your colony. You want it hot (but not too hot) and humid (but not too humid).
The magic numbers for temperature and humidity are right around 90°F and 60% humidity. Too hot, and your crickets will get sluggish and then rapidly start to die. Too humid, and you will see mold and the rapid spread of disease in the habitat.
How to dial in the right temperature and humidity depends on where you live and the time of year. It’s wise to set your crickets up somewhere stable, preferably indoors.
You can always bump the temperature by adding a heating pad to their habitat. It doesn’t have to be touching the storage bin they live in, keeping it nearby can be enough.
Typically, you’re mostly going to be worried about keeping the humidity down rather than trying to bump it up. Ventilation is your best friend here. You will want to have a mesh screen on the roof of your crickets’ enclosure, but changing its size will create more air flow and dry things out.
To monitor the conditions in the habitat, you can use a remote thermometer/hygrometer. This will let you check the temperature and humidity without opening the habitat, which will stress your crickets.
Nutrition and Stress
The other keys to cricket production are keeping your crickets stress-free and as healthy as possible.
Diet-wise, you want to ensure your crickets get lots of protein. Their staple food should be something like dog or cat food, that includes a balance of nutrients. Supplement this with fruits and veggies. Citrus fruits are especially good as they will also provide hydration.
The main cause of stress for crickets is overcrowding. Crickets are cannibalistic, and their bodily functions are very messy, so an overcrowded cage can get dirty quick. A good rule of thumb is to keep it under 100 crickets per gallon of space, although you might want even more room than that. This will cut down on cannibalism and reduce how often you need to clean to keep things hygienic.
Cleaning and Disease
As we already mentioned, crickets constantly make a mess of everything. The biggest battle in keeping your crickets stress-free is keeping them clean and healthy. This means daily checks to remove dead crickets and soiled substrate as well as replacing egg flats as they get destroyed.
You will want to do deep cleans every couple weeks to every month, where you will move all of the crickets from one container to an empty one and then clean their main habitat with bleach. If you have brown house crickets, this is necessary to keep colony-wide disease out. It will also help reduce stress, as crickets respond negatively to being in an unclean habitat.