Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Man, any luck with helping me identify which of your cuttings died?

Here's a small mulberry plant Steve. Can't help yoy with the other.

thanks VB, someone's got their s%#t together!

With discussion rampant in the "Black Soldier Fly" thread and other info in the "Lupin" thread thought I'd post this article on Meatmeal
as an alternative food source

and for those that missed it here's the
Lupin Feed
article

My gecko`s enjoy silkworms when i can get them and so does the catfish but she`ll eat anything including chocolate cake.. so that`s nothing to go by really.
Beekeepers may have waxworms in the hives? (another catfish and gecko favourite)
Mealworms are easy to breed and crickets if you can stand the noise

Yeh I've got a heap of mealworms. I feed my fish 20 or so everytime I think of it as a treat. They love them - that's for sure.

hex, got much info on breeding the crickets? what do they eat?

Crickets eat pretty much everything. I used to give them melon rinds and apple cores. They need some soil to lay eggs in. The female inserts her ovipositor into the soil. I used to catch and save up crickets for fishing as a kid. I just used an old fish tank with an inch or two of soil in the bottom. Then a blue-tailed skink (small native lizard) saw my crickets, and so I had a pet skink instead of fishing crickets.

yep, janet is right they`ll eat absolutely anything veggie or cereal and that dried dogfood too alledgedly.

There`s lots of guides on the net that do step by step destructions for breeding most insects. You can even find the nutritional analysis lol

http://www.angelfire.com/tx/facehugger/insect.html

The lifespan is only about 6 weeks but with a production line of the various sizes (each time they moult they gain a size which is called an instar) so you can match the food size to the diner

Have a good percentage of females to males for more efficient breeding.. sort through them and feed any surplus males to the fish first.

my perch don't really mind what size bugs get thrown in with them, they rip everything apart to eat them. I've thrown grasshoppers that were 6cm long into the tank with the 12cm and smaller fish. They don't last long but breeding your own crickets sounds interesting too.

I can't wait for summer when we have insects again -- live food is so much more interesting for the fish.

hmm, crickets sound like an interesting one. might give them a go.........if i bought some from the pet store (lizzard food) would they have a mix of male / female?

I've tried a few times to breat crickets for my lizards with variable success. There's heaps of instructions on the net. Yeah steve just start with a pack of adults from the pet store for about $5. The females are the ones with the stick hanging out the end of their butt. My biggest problem was having other insects comming to eat the baby crickets. My first try I had about 200 pin head size then overnight ants came in and cleaned out the lot. Just recently I tried again and only got about 20 to hatch but a cockroach cleaned me out.

were you keeping them in a sealed plastic box? maybe putting the box in a moat would keep other bugs out

I don't like crickets because they are noisy and stink.