A home for your lizard's dinner (Lee's Kricket Keepers)

Member Name: PyrettaBlaze

Product:	Lee's Kricket Keepers
Date:	21/01/08 (63 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Secure, dont have to touch crickets,

Disadvantages: Open design makes it seem not secure, might not work for brown crickets.

I am not alone among lizard keepers for the fact that I HATE crickets. And I mean I hate them. They are horrible looking, smelly, scary, disgusting, capable of infesting your house and they bite. Yuck yuck yuck,

In case you are unfamilar with crickets, they are insects with long, grasshopper like back legs, capable of jumping. Adult male crickets also sing, which makes a sort of whirring noise. You can imagine the joys of living with the little buggers, although strangely enough, I actually find the noise helps me to sleep now I'm used to it! They come in brown (noisy, very fast and can jump very high) or black (slower but more aggressive and they look like cockroaches...ugh).

In order to keep pet lizards, you need to keep insects to feed them on...and crickets are usually people's first port of call, because they are nutritious, reasonably easy to keep and breed, and cheap and readily available. Unfortunately, they are nasty creatures also.

There are a lot of lizard keepers who despise handling crickets, because of their speed, jumpiness, smell (fishy) and the fact that they have no qualms about biting. Lee's Kricket Keeper was designed with these wussies in mind.


The design

Lee's Kricket Keeper is basically a plastic tub with a ventilated lid. There are four large holes in the lid, through which you poke four black plastic tubes. One end is covered by a cap, the other is left open.


How it works

Crickets are nocturnal animals, so naturally they like darkness and quiet. They crawl into the black tubes where it is dark and close (the inside surface is rough to let them get a grip) and there they stay...until your lizard gets hungry. You simply pull out one of the tubes, cover the end, shake the crickets out into a bag to vitamin dust them (you have to shake quite violently as the crickets hang on for dear life), and then tweezer them out and into your lizards cage. The cage design means that if you despise crickets, you never have to touch them, and you dont have to do too much faffing about with tweezers either. It is ideal for squeamish people like myself.


Good bits

You dont have to touch the crickets with your fingers or fiddle about with tweezers with these tanks. In fact you dont even need to open the lid. This keeps the little nasties where they belong...either in the lizards gob or in the tank!

This works fine for icky slow black crickets, but I'm not sure the jumpy brown ones would be kept in here...but loads of people use them for brown crickets, so I suppose they must...just dont ask me to try it.

A bearded dragon can eat a good fifteen insects in a sitting...picking them up one by one with tweezers, bagging and dusting them is tiresome. With these it takes much less time to pick up a whole load of crickets in one go.

If like me, you are fascinated by things that disgust you, you can see the crickets up close and personal as they crawl up to the clear plastic caps on the ends of the tubes, and see their nasty little faces staring out at you...AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH!



Bad bits

The problem with crickets is that they are fast, jumpy things. I always use the black ones, which are meatier and generally move much slower, but the browns are like lightning even with legs missing (crickets have the charming habit of eating each other and pulling off each others legs, and its not uncommon to spot stray cricket legs in the tank) and I can imagine pulling the tube out of the tub would result in a lot of escapes when it comes to brown crickets...fortuntately I've not lost any black ones yet. You need to cover over the ends superfast in order not to have an infestation in your home.

Although these are secure, the overall design makes it look as if they arent. I'm prone to phantom itches when I see insects, and just the thought of them escaping makes me scratch like a cat with fleas. I'm sure if they all made an effort, by piling on top of one another, they could escape. I can see them watching me as I'm typing this. Dont want to give them ideas!

Getting the tubes in and out is fiddly to say the least, and you'll probably end up with a few squished crickets...but then the other will probably eat them.

At the end of a tub of crickets, when you're down to the last few, they seem to wise up and realise that the dark tubes do not lead to cricket heaven, but certain death at the hands of a fat reptile.

These might encourage less well-read lizard owners to just take out the tube and shake it right into the lizards tank...which is a bad idea. If you put a load of crickets in the tank in one go, they will sometimes swarm the lizard and start attacking it. Though they are tiny compared to the lizard they can still do a lot of damage...I've had a pet tree frog killed by a cricket bite. Also, crickets need to be dusted with special vitamin powder before they are fed to the lizard.


If like me, you love lizards but hate crickets, Lee's Kricket Keepers are ideal. You dont have the handle the nasty little creepy crawlies and they are kept securely locked up. I am still not convinced they would keep the brown crickets in and I'm not willing to try it, but for black crickets they are perfect. They make one of the nastiest jobs you have as a lizard keeper much easier.

Summary: A really helpful idea for the wusses like me.