Crickets are omnivores and scavengers by nature. They’ll eat just about anything that is available to them (including their fellow crickets), which means you must be super careful about what you provide in their habitat. You’ll want to feed them a highly nutritious diet, especially if they are going to be consumed by your reptiles or amphibians. There are plenty of options when it comes to feeding crickets. They need a dry source of food, as well as a watery or fresh source of food. You can pick some of these dry foods and also offer a couple of the wet foods to give your crickets a balanced meal.
Here are some of the best dry foods you can feed to your crickets:
1.) Crushed cat food, dog food, chicken feed ( if possible, you’ll want to use vegetable based feed)
2.) Cricket chow – This is commercially produced cricket feed. You can find this for sale at any place that sells crickets.
3.) Mixed seeds and nuts - unsalted raw sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, almonds, peanuts
4.) Alfalfa – course ground or powdered
5.) Wheat Bran
And these are some of the best fresh foods you can feed to your crickets:
1.) Greens – romaine lettuce, collard greens, mustard greens, dandelion leaves, broccoli
2.) Potatoes – These are a cricket favorite. They even enjoy sweet potatoes.
3.) Carrots
4.) Fruits – apples, oranges, grapefruits, berries, mango, papaya, banana
Dairy products can also be used as part of the dry or wet food sources. Dry milk is often used as an ingredient in cricket gut loading recipes. Gut loading is a term used to describe the process of stuffing your crickets with lots of nutritious foods right before you feed them to your lizards, frogs, or any other pet. Typically, a gut load consists of a mixture of all of the healthiest foods that you are already feeding to your crickets. The difference between regular feeding and gut loading is that when you gut load, you are combining multiple types of foods together to overload the nutritional value.
Crickets should be served a gut load regularly for a few days before they are fed to your pets. If you feed them the gut load too soon, you’ll be wasting it. If you don’t feed it soon enough, there won’t be sufficient nutrition to pass on to your pets.
found this on a website about cricket breeding.
Light dusting with powdered supplements should be considered a secondary source of vitamins and minerals, not the primary source.
