Roaches and pics!!! DUW

Just wanted to show what I put up with for my leos to have good food
First its my Turkistan Roaches or Blatta Lateralis
They get to be a little bigger than an adult cricket plus they are non climbing!!! Males and females are easy to tell apart.
Female
http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...Picture030.jpg
Male
http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...Picture032.jpg
They need to be kept at high temps to breed successfully. I keep the hot side of the tub at just over 100(F) and the cool side is in the 80 degree range. They are an egg laying species so for these guys its best to keep the humidity in the 50%-70% range. I feed them a diet of ground rodent block, dog food, oats, and calcium. You'll get 20+/- babies out of a single egg casing. They are VERY fast and seem to refuse to burrow
http://i41.photobucket.com/albums/e2...Picture028.jpg

ick. come raid my garage, you'll have food for life :D

I can show you a appartment complex that is literally covered with them inside.

cool, i like feeder roaches. i have a colony of pauphoeta cinerea (lobster roaches) and i like them way better then crickets.

i keep mine just like you do, lol. over a hundredin the hottest places (up to 105-110) and 80 in other areas. plus, they have egg cartons stacked to choose what temoerature they want from the bottom up.

have you tried the roach gutload from cricketfood.com?

Eeek.. reminds me of some of the houses that Mark manages for his investors. Roaches are the one thing that I would never bring into the house.. I swear, if we got roaches, I would abandon everything and start over somewhere else, lol. Mark used to pick up furniture from roach-infested houses; they would not die when he fumigated the truck; they were back there twitching..
Kudos to anyone who can breed/keep them; I would love to feed them to my horned frog, but since there are other alternatives available, luckily I don't have to. :)

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Originally Posted by mr~python

cool, i like feeder roaches. i have a colony of pauphoeta cinerea (lobster roaches) and i like them way better then crickets.

i keep mine just like you do, lol. over a hundredin the hottest places (up to 105-110) and 80 in other areas. plus, they have egg cartons stacked to choose what temoerature they want from the bottom up.

have you tried the roach gutload from cricketfood.com?

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No I havent. I perfer to make my own foods that way I can be sure what goes into it. A lot of those gutloads are primarily ground corn. You are what you eat and thats why I make my own. I think I'll stay away from the climbers. it would be a pain to paint the top of all the cages with that bug boundary just to keep feeders in.

very cool that you raise all your own food. but you can have the roaches

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Originally Posted by tmlowe5704

very cool that you raise all your own food. but you can have the roaches

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lol Thanks. Roaches aren't as bad as I thought they would be. I put less than 5 minutes a week into caring for them which is much easier than going and buying 3-4 dozen crickets a week!!

but they are icky roaches! lol

I've picked up a roach gutload from www.blaberus.com it seems to work pretty well. I'm not sure what's in it, but I doubt it's mostly corn, since James specializes in selling roaches.

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Originally Posted by tmlowe5704

but they are icky roaches! lol

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But unlike crickets, they don't stink, they don't make noise, they don't carry nematodes that could kill my inverts, and they don't typically eat other.

How big was your colony of latteralis when you started out? I picked up some at Tinley and I've been letting the colony grow, I haven't started feeding them off yet.

another thing most people dont realize about roaches is that if you get the right species they wont be able to survive (or at the least wont be able to reproduce) outside of their heated tub/tank so even if worse case happens and you lose one or two, they'll die off pretty quickly and that's the end of it.

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Originally Posted by Pork Chops N' Corn Bread

No I havent. I perfer to make my own foods that way I can be sure what goes into it. A lot of those gutloads are primarily ground corn. You are what you eat and thats why I make my own.

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i was just wondering because i saw the runny frass on the cartons and ive never seen that with my roaches. they're always nice hard little balls of frass. i use the roach gutload from cricketfood.