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In my opinion the smell of lats isn't nearly as bad as crickets. Good luck with them.
Best feeder roach
- Thread starter Exo
- Start date
The smell in the bin is more intense with small vents but the smell that escapes in the room seems to be less until of course you open the bin. To me they do not smell all that bad. I think my dubia and hissers especially smell way worse.
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Ive actually used lobsters N. cinerea as a staple for years and have had great success but I admit it takes a while to get a method down for picking them out of the bin and feeding them off as they climb glass, I always failed at hatching eggcases until recently I finally hatched out some lats and P. australasiae(sp?). And with lobsters i've used B. discoidalis for years and have never had a problem with a T not taking a discoid, ive never worked with dubia's to see firsthand a T not take one, but have never had that problem with discoids. Also hissing roaches reproduce quite quickly if fed and watered well, if not they take forever to reproduce but they grow on the slow side.
Look on Kingsnake, and find the Bug Pros, they have THE best deals on lats . . .
IMO
Each roach has its own good/bad, and each is useful in the right situation.
Seriously, Id get some of both and switch them up on feeding night, variety is always best.
As a side-note, my Ts love the lats and dont really mess with the dubias, but my frogs and some other inverts/verts love the dubias.
Humidity doesn't seem to affect the roaches themselves very much at all. They do fine in Arizona and it's pretty dang dry there. The thing that needs humidity is the egg case, which is why a lot of people use a moist substrate with these guys. Warm temperatures are good. 80's, low 90's. They are pretty tough little guys so it's difficult to say what the "best" temperature is. Whatever it is, it's pretty warm. At American room temperatures they slow down and don't reproduce much.
I know some people that feed them fruit for liquids, but it doesn't seem like a good idea to me. For one thing, you have to constantly be putting fruit in there. If you give them water crystals, or better yet water with styrofoam pieces floating in it to prevent drownings, you don't have to mess with them very frequently at all. Another thing is that fruit is more expensive than water, and if they don't eat it for whatever reason it gets nasty.
On the other hand, eating some fruit is a good thing for variety and nutrition I'm sure, so if you are down with that, go for it.
i basically feed my roaches two things: catfood in one dish and dry oatmeal in the other. When they want protein they do the catfood, otherwise oatmeal (they eat a lot more oatmeal than catfood).
if I had access to it I'd feed chicken feed instead.
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Does anyone have problems with their roaches carrying the water crystals away. Everyday that I go to put water on the crystals they are gone. EVERY DAY! Its frustrating to say the least.
They actually eat the crystals, not just suck water from them. The way I've managed to keep the crystals in longer is to put them in a water dispenser. The roaches will drink the water between the crystals rather than the crystals themselves. This prevents them from drowning like they would in an open dispenser.
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Could you post a pic so I know what you mean?
http://www.arachnoboards.com/ab/showpost.php?p=1320676&postcount=12
That's what I used to do, now I just use these and put crystals in the bowl.
http://www.petco.com/product/14584/...Guard-Filter-Screen.aspx?CoreCat=OnSiteSearch
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Very cool. Thanks
brothaT,
Thanks for the link. This looks interesting. If you don't mind answering, how long does this water dispenser last you? What species of roach(s) are you using this on and how many of them are in the bin?
I am just trying to get an idea of how long it would last for me. I go through about 3 gallons of water crystals a week and would like to try to get away from them all together. The bottle in that link is only 16 oz and that does not seem like it would last that long.
Thanks for your reply.
Good question, it lasts about 2 days in an 8,000 count lat colony and around 3 days in a 4,000 count dubia colony. I keep them in the low 80s and dry. Conceptually this should work on a larger scale, I just don't have room for anything much bigger than that 16 oz dispenser. If you have room in the bin I don't see why you couldn't use those 1 gallon dispensers for big dogs. Also, they will not go through 16 oz of water as fast as 16 oz of crystals. Now I only go through about 1/8 of the crystals I used to before I tried this out.
You probably don't want anything that will last more than a week because it will start to stink and get nasty with roach waste.