Crickets and Worms

I mentioned before that I have a pet salamander; I caught him fair and square as he was crossing the street several months ago. My diligent google-based research on the care of salamanders informed me that crickets are the best food for them. Being the responsible* and dependable* person I am, I promptly went to the pet store and bought a bag of crickets for Jethro (the best salamander name ever) to consume. Have you EVER tried to extract only a single cricket from a bag of 25 of its living, jumping brethren? Its about as easy as typing with chopsticks while blindfolded. I finally managed to do it by just barely opening the bag, squeezing out most of the air, and then herding a single cricket towards the opening from OUTSIDE the bag while holding the whole mess above the tank. It took about 10 minutes. Unfortunately in my zeal I had forgotten that crickets, like MOST animals, need air to survive; The remaining 24 crickets were dead in about 2 hours. Well, I'm not doing THAT again.

* The claims made in this post are not evaluated by the FDA

Since that accidental massacre took place, I've been feeding Jethro a steady diet of mealworms, waxworms, nightcrawlers and other things used as live bait.

As much fun as it is to store vermin in my fridge behind the yogurt, I recently decided to step up my care for Jethro. I went out and got him some new moss, cleaned his tank all nice, and even decided to give crickets another try. Thats when I discovered THIS contraption. You put the crickets inside, with some food, and they crawl up into the little tubes to escape the light. When its time for some of them to get eated, you pull the tube out, evict as many of the tenants as you please, and then replace the tube! The guy who invented this is probably some kind of evil genius. No doubt he spends his off hours stroking white cats and designing elaborate ways to kill Mr. Bond.

My nephew saw the cricket box yesterday, and excitedly asked me when I had gotten pet crickets. I told him they weren't pets, I was only keeping them so I could feed them to Jethro. He screamed "NO YOU CANT FEED THEM TO HIM, THEY ARE TOO CUTE". It took me a long time to calm him down, but at least I wasn't feeding him mice.