Coco Bark/ Earwigs

[BumbleinGrey]

Not sure where to post this. So sorry if it's in the wrong section. It's a common vivarium substrate, so I thought I'd ask here.

We set up a small cricket container with the coco bark you have to reconstitute with water. Everything was going fine until suddenly we had a huge infestation of earwigs in the substrate . I have no earwigs in the house at ALL, so I don't think they crawled in there or anything.

The only conclusion I have come to is that perhaps there were earwig eggs in the substrate? Has anyone ever heard of this??

It's the Exo Terra brand Coco husk, two acryllic dishes, fluker cricket food and water, a piece of egg carton, and crickets bought from the local store.
Any insight would be wonderful

This really concerns me because I was planning to put a little bit of a reconsituted moss from the same company into our vivarium when we are constructing it (on the background). But if this is a common problem with this type of substrate I do NOT want to use it!

[Jason]

Probably the earwigs planted the eggs while the brick was in the store or the storage area where extra stock is held. ive been useing Exo bricks for 12 years now and never had an infestation from a single one, have had some strange plants sprout from them but not any insects large enough to catch my eye, this could be because i use very hot water to rehydrate the brick in a large 20gal bucket.

[Athen]

i too have never had any bugs coming from my substrate and i use that for all my vivs not for as long as jason has been but for about 6 months now i have however like jason mentioned had some wierd plants sprout although it was some that i was throwing out after cleaning out all my vives and was mixed with some rabbit bedding that had rabbit food in it which contains seeds of some sort so im not sure if that may have caused the plants

[Green Ghost]

I would say that the earwigs rode in with the crickets. Maybe in the form of larvae or eggs? Crickets are very dirty and carry lots of small insects with them. I've had mite infestations in the cricket container and beetle infestations too. I don't put any substrate in there for them anymore (I used to use a thin - 1/4" - layer of sand). I just use egg flats (the cartons that eggs come in) because it creates more surface area for the crickets to move around and hide in.

[Jason]

Aye, GG has a good point, im always finding random beetles and other nasty looking things in my box's of crickets, i normally buy them by the thousand for 28$$, not bad seeing i loose about 300 over a week, well, when i had a CWD for a couple months. You can buy Egg Carton from art supply stores of something of the sort to add to the enclosure houseing the crickets so you dont have to reuse the nasty crap that comes with them, will prolly cut down on intruders meh thinks

[EggplantBug]

I've noticed, lately, a lot of places (McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts) are switching to egg carton for their drink trays. We were redoing our kitchen and by the end of a week without a stove, we'd amassed a good dozen of the trays from eating out.

[froggsong]

That's a GREAT suggestion, Eggplant! (love the name, btw ) Cardboard tubes (toilet paper, paper towels, the rolls from boxes of foil and stuff are good too, and more sturdy) and plastic tubes or PVC that you rough up on the inside are also VERY good. The plastic and pvc are the best, IMO, because you can wash and reuse them, plus the crickets do very well in tubes, and are easier to dispense.

[EggplantBug]

Thanks, and thanks!

Wish I'd kept the tubes from my bigger cricket keeper that now serves as Wilhelm's temp tank during cleanings (have used soap on it so now it's cricket death valley). I would have happily sent them to folks as they're too big for our other keeper. I always seem to throw out the useful stuff!

[froggsong]

yeah, I have tubes from a small cricket keeper, but I used them to raise the platform in my newts paludarium, because they fit really tight inside of the PVC legs, and I didn't want to have to actually take the FB apart to install new PVC, since she had to go right back in it. I want to try to figure out how to rough the inside of a wider piece of PVC to put in the current cricket tank (cricket keeper was too small, and I had too many deaths in it anyway).

You know, I wonder why there is no forum category for cricket talk... There should be, A great deal of us feed them to SOMETHING!

[EggplantBug]

Originally Posted by froggsong

You know, I wonder why there is no forum category for cricket talk... There should be, A great deal of us feed them to SOMETHING!

That's a good thought! How odd that there isn't one!