Crickets by mail!

We got a little  bored with going to the pet store every three or four days to buy 15 or 20 crickets to feed Crisp’s Leopard Gecko (who now has a name- Dread Pirate Roberts, DPR or DiPpeR for short). So after a little research I found that I can order 100 to be automatically delivered every 2 weeks over the internet (of course!). He (or she, we’re still not sure) eats 4 or 5 a day so that should be just about right, and the price (about $13 with shipping) is just about the same as we were paying at the pet store.

Of course they have to live somewhere, so we ordered a larger version of the cricket pen we initially got,  and I placed an initial test order for the crickets. The pen arrived yesterday and the crickets arrived this morning via the mailman.

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but they arrived in a cardboard tube with metal ends with hundreds of little tiny holes in each end, and a section of egg carton to crawl about on. I opened it very carefully outside (!) and gingerly shook them out into the pre-prepared pen and was very happy to find that it looks like they all survived the trip.

They must be hungry as they fell on the food and hydro-gel; crickets drown easily so you give them water as a gel that they can eat and get hydrated from, but not drown in- that’s the yellow, globby stuff, the orange blocks are the food. They get special food that is calcium-rich which is called “gut-loading” which allows you to feed more calcium to the Gecko (they also get dusted in a special vitamin-rich powder right before they are fed to him).

Now we just need to see if they will live for the full two weeks. Well, some of them will Gecko poo within a couple of days, but I need the lucky ones to live as long as possible…