Hi all.

I have had a nightmare day really. I will explain what has happened and see if you guys can shed any light as I am clueless.

In my reptile room I have three large Really Useful Boxes.

In the bottom one I put about 50 adult locusts, straw, egg laying glasses and egg carton. I fed them greens and grass. Box had a lid but was very well ventillated. The box was kept very dry and had a heatmat on one side.

In the next box is my lobster roach colony. Open top box, vaseline round the top edge. In the box is lots of egg cartons and a ceramic dish with some bug gel in. They are fed various fruits and veg as available. This colony started as 30 and i have tons of babies in there now.

The top box was a couple of bulk bags of adult brown crickets, egg cartons and eco earth substrate, also fed a varied diet. This box had no lid so no humidity.

Everything was fine on Friday and seemed ok yesterday too but I stayed at my other halfs last night.

When we came back here around 10 this morning, we were shocked to find ALL the locusts dead, every single one, about half the lobster roaches seemingly dead and most of the crickets dead.

All the locusts have been disposed of. I have salvaged the living crickets. I am also moving all the live lobsters to a new box.

A lot of the lobsters are on their backs kicking, unable to flip over. Now i havent seen that EVER being the case, if they are on their backs they can usually flip straight over.

So, to quote a popular term, WTF? I am completely gutted.

Let me stress a few things.

• The locusts have been in that box for over a month, doing well, mating, laying etc.

• The lobsters have been doing GREAT from day one and breeding really well.

• The crickets, well I dont know, they were dying off, only had them a few weeks, maybe there was moisture in the eco earth that was causing problems despite their box being lidless?
• The crickets and lobsters were fed some apple from morrisons as their last meal, the locusts had grass.
• My parents were home and neither of them went into the room apart from to turn the lights off at night (so no air freshener sprayed or anything like that)

So I am wondering if any of you guys have had similar problems?

It has come as a total shock to us.

Thanks

Gary

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thats crap, sorry to hear that.
my thoughts would be towards contamination, one of the species has brought something in that has killed em off. i dunno what else it could be

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Thanks for the reply.

Well I will be calling the supplier tomorrow just in case!

Gary

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thats funny that, i also had most of my locusts die of today for no reason at all. they were all mangled and unable to move.

im with c-strike on thi one, probably cross contamination

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my inverts too many

my massive list of reps 0.0.1 corn snake

LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO LMAO

Have you fed anything to all of them? Do you use a max / min thermometer in the room that would tell you if it got exceptionally cold in there last night?

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Hades - It wont get cold at night, snake racks keeps everything gently warm. Also, the crix and lobsters had apple, the locusts had grass (same grass they have had many times!)

Joe - Did you buy any of them recently? If so please pm me where they came from.

Cheers guys.

Gary

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