# Are chocolate and coffee safe for roaches and the spiders that eat them?



## Moltar (Aug 21, 2008)

So I stumbled across a tin of waaay old mocha-almond-macadamia biscotti that was stale, stale, stale. Without a second thought i went ahead and threw it in the B lateralis enclosure. As usual, they loved it. Swarming all over and eating it in no time flat. Kinda like army ants...

As an afterthought I wonder if they'd be adversly effected by the caffeine (or the nuts for that matter). Anybody ever heard of ill effects from these or other ingredients?


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## Hedorah99 (Aug 21, 2008)

etown_411 said:


> So I stumbled across a tin of waaay old mocha-almond-macadamia biscotti that was stale, stale, stale. Without a second thought i went ahead and threw it in the B lateralis enclosure. As usual, they loved it. Swarming all over and eating it in no time flat. Kinda like army ants...
> 
> As an afterthought I wonder if they'd be adversly effected by the caffeine (or the nuts for that matter). Anybody ever heard of ill effects from these or other ingredients?


I am not sure about caffeine but know chocolate is not good for a bunch of animals. They'll probably be fine but would refrain from taking them to Starbucks in the near future.:}


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## ThomasH (Aug 21, 2008)

etown_411 said:


> So I stumbled across a tin of waaay old mocha-almond-macadamia biscotti that was stale, stale, stale. Without a second thought i went ahead and threw it in the B lateralis enclosure. As usual, they loved it. Swarming all over and eating it in no time flat. Kinda like army ants...
> 
> As an afterthought I wonder if they'd be adversly effected by the caffeine (or the nuts for that matter). Anybody ever heard of ill effects from these or other ingredients?


It'd be interesting to see how coffee affects roaches. Anything weird happening?
TBH


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## halfwaynowhere (Aug 21, 2008)

i wouldn't do it. Caffeine is a natural insecticide. coffee plants (and cocoa plants) produce caffeine to help keep bugs away. The reason it affects us the way it does is because our bodies react to the poison, giving us more "energy".


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## arachnocat (Aug 21, 2008)

That's interesting. I've seen the used coffee grounds at Bux and thought about using them for my bugs but didn't want to risk it. Would be nice to get some of those cocoa shells and that coffee for the garden though. That would smell pretty tasty. Mmmm....


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## Moltar (Aug 21, 2008)

halfwaynowhere said:


> i wouldn't do it. Caffeine is a natural insecticide. coffee plants (and cocoa plants) produce caffeine to help keep bugs away. The reason it affects us the way it does is because our bodies react to the poison, giving us more "energy".



Oh. Great. I gess it's a good thing I only fed it to my B lateralis and left the B dubia's with just cat food. I'll observe for a few days before feeding them to anybody. :wall: 

I figure the amount of caffeine was probably relatively small. It's not like I fed them coffee grounds or straight chocolate; just mocha flavored baked goods. In any case, they weren't at all deterred by the presence of the caffeine. Four 4" pieces of biscotti were gone in under an hour.


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## Rochelle (Aug 21, 2008)

Everybody loves chocolate and caffeine...
But it isn't good for ANY of us.
I wouldn't recommend giving it again....especially if you're feeding the roaches to anything expensive or rare.  
I know you have a really good collection. It would suck hard, if they died because of something like this.


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## DrAce (Aug 21, 2008)

Caffeine is an insecticide, but it's worth noting that roaches have some pretty neat tricks for getting past naturally occuring pesticides.
My hunch is that they'll be fine.
Caffeine doesn't kill higher animals - chocolate kills dogs because of another compound - theobromine.
I'd also bet that there was little to no caffeine in the food anyway, unless it was added by the manufacturer.

As an aside, caffeine 'wakes' us because it inhibits cyclic AMP production.  Wikipedia has quite a good synopsis of this process.


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## Moltar (Aug 23, 2008)

After 2 days i've seen no ill effects in the roach colony. I think i'll go back to feeding them to a couple of the less exotics t's and see if they're ok. 

I knew there was a reason I got all those B albo slings a while back...


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## crpy (Aug 23, 2008)

Ahh, sacrificial curlies lol


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## JohnEDove (Aug 24, 2008)

Hey they say chocolate is an aphrodisiac right? Maybe you'll get some extra breeding from it.


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## Tim Rydén (Aug 24, 2008)

that chocolate kills dogs is just a myth, my dog ate a whole chocolatcake once and he was fine..


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## crpy (Aug 24, 2008)

Tim Rydén said:


> that chocolate kills dogs is just a myth, my dog ate a whole chocolatcake once and he was fine..


I think it has to do with the level of Theobromine and size of dog.

My dog did the same thing plus a whole package of chocolate covered gram crackers


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## Moltar (Aug 24, 2008)

I think they have to eat a lot of it. My friend's labrador ate a whole double layer mega-chocolate cake with chocolate icing and had a pretty close call. He was having seizures and stuff. I believe they pumped his stomach. That same dog also once ate about 5lbs of bone meal. That was a pretty dramatic situation too.

So far the only thing I've fed the chocolate laced lateralis to is my local species of mantis and she seems fine with it.


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## Newyork (Aug 24, 2008)

I would only worried about bio magnification. Which is were a posion in one creature is magnified by the creature that is next up on the food chain and on and on. That would mean that it might not effect the roaches but it could effect the T if it ate several of them. It is unlikely that this would happen though since I doubt that there was much caffine in the biscotti. 

As for dogs, the general rule for milk choclate is that a dog would have to eat an ounce of chocolate for each pound of its weight. So a 10 pound dog only would have to eat 10 ounces of milk choclate to die while a 75 pound dog would have to eat 75 ounces of it before it would reach a deadly level. Personally I think that if a 200 pound human ate 200 ounces of choclate they'd want to die. Yuck. So honestly it isn't likely for a large dog to eat enough to kill it. Who has that much choclate in the house?


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