Crickets

Crickets are a critically important prey insect in the diets of lizards, pet tarantulas and many more exotic pets. To keep your pet healthy, it is also important to keep the crickets healthy. Keeping crickets at home is a simple task, and the cricket habitat is very easy to maintain.

To keep your pet's health in prime shape, it is best to take the crickets you buy at the pet store and bring them home to a small cricket habitat. Place a carrot in the habitat, and a small piece of wet sponge to provide the crickets with water. "Feed the food" means gut loading your crickets. The nutrition and vitamins the crickets consume are passed on to the pet reptile or arthropod. A calcium dust of the crickets right before feeding is very important to giving your exotic pet the calcium it needs.

For more information, go to How to Care for Crickets.

For a complete overview regarding keeping ants away from your crickets, go to How to Keep Ants Away from Pets. Raising crickets in a separate vivarium and caring for crickets is the best bet for keeping your pet healthy, but ants are an ongoing nightmare.

The easiest way to avoid ants is to use the "moat technique," where you take a shallow pan that's larger than the cricket habitat, raise the habitat on overturned bowls in the middle of the pan, and make sure you keep the water level up. Ants will not cross the water and your crickets are safe.