Why I hate crickets (and love Cresties)

I've kept herps almost my entire life. I've seen a lot of things change over
time but one thing has stayed the same since the beginning: keeping lizards is
as much about caring for the lizard as it is about caring for crickets.

While you can buy crickets at just about any pet store, when bought in small
quantities, they're very expensive. Buying in bulk means that you have to get
serious about caring for them which means cleaning their enclosure every few
days, providing high quality food (and they eat like crazy!), changing their
water daily as they soil it almost instantly.

No matter how much you clean them, a cricket container with 500 crickets will
start to smell really bad. It can stink up an entire room.

For a single anole or leopard gecko, you can get away with buying a few dozen
crickets a week. You still need to gut load them. Many people fail to do this
and it will come back to haunt you. For a larger number of lizards or a large
lizard (like an adult bearded dragon), you can easily go through 500 crickets
in a couple weeks. With my collection of herps, when everything is fully active
in the spring, summer, and fall, I go through 1000 crickets every two weeks.

For a dedicated hobbyist, it's well worth it.

Enter crested geckos.

Not only do these guys have more personality than many other types of lizards,
they have one characteristic that makes them stand out above all other common
herps. They not only do well, but *thrive* on a prepared diet. What I find
so wonderful about this is that I can focus my time on caring for geckos instead
of crickets or meal worms. It really has made a big difference for me in how
I look to the hobby.

Housing individual males

Crested Geckos typically produce 50/50 male vs. female offspring. So far, they don't seem to exhibit Temperature-dependent Sex Determination (TSD) so there's no way to alter this.

Since we typically setup breeding groups with 3-1 female to male ratios, there's the inevitable question of how do we house the extra males?

A common approach is to use 20-quart Sterilite bins. This particular model of bin is a little unusual in its dimensions as it's 9.5 inches tall. Both the 15-quart and 32-quart bins are only 6 inches tall by comparison. As an arboreal species, this extra height is pretty important.

I've been considering different designs for a rack system out of melamine for these bins. They are somewhat oddly shaped and most of my designs end up with an unacceptable amount of wasted material. What I like so much about my Sterilite(TM) 66-quart Ladder Rack is that there is virtually no waste which keeps the cost low.

After going over a number of designs, I came up with a rack that measure about two feet wide, by sixteen inches deep, by three feet high that can house 6 containers. Being relatively short, I figure I can stack a rack on top of this rack to get 12 containers in a two foot space. If I extend the height a bit, I can probably get 14 containers to fit but I think that would end up looking pretty ugly.

As far as space goes, as long as depth stays reasonable, it really doesn't matter. Ideally, we want to keep height at around 6 feet and utilized as fully as possible. Assuming that, we can compare racks by just focusing on width. For the 66-quart ladder rack, I'm able to achieve about 3.6 containers/foot. For the 20-quart rack, I'm looking at 2 containers/foot.

The question I'm now considering is whether the extra 1.6 containers/foot is a net win compared to providing a much larger space per enclosure. Obviously, the 66-quart bins are 3x larger than the 20-quart bins.

As of right now, I'm leaning toward using 66-quart bins for individual males. Given the scale I'm working at, the 20-quart bins simply don't seem to offer a compelling advantage since I would end up gaining 75% greater density at a cost of giving each gecko 330% more space.

Choosing the right rack system

While I have the luxury of not having a ton of adult geckos, I've been putting a lot of thought and work into my adult enclosures. The most common technique seems to be using 66-quart Sterilite bins. They are roughly 15 gallons in size and typically are used to house 2-3 female geckos and 1 male gecko. Another option is a screen enclosure such as Zoo Meds ReptiBreeze.

In the end, I decided to go with the Sterilite bins. The main reason is that I felt I would have to use a live shrub in the ReptiBreeze enclosures and setting up appropriately lighting to support that would have made it difficult to use any sort of rack system.

After researching various commercial rack systems, I settled with building my own with melamine boards. I've posted a build log of this project. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out.



My only problem now is decided how I want to house individual males. I'll save that for another posting though.