Wild crickets taste better
Aug 25th, 2008 by Q
Kina and Nina, the pair of leopard geckos that live with us, usually dine on crickets raised and bred in captivity. This translates to a plastic bin filled with 30 to 100 crickets – more than would ever live that close together in nature. I feed them left-over vegetable scraps or a nutrition-enhanced cricket feed from the store. This is not apparently an ideal formula for happy healthy crickets. The bin ends up accumulating dead crickets that die for whatever reason and I often don’t get around to cleaning it out. After a week or so it starts to stink pretty bad, at which point I do clean it.
When we came up here a month ago, my father-in-law suggested we just catch wild crickets instead of buying them at the store. I thought he was joking at first, but after further thought decided it was a good idea. This is becoming a pattern.
The easiest place to find crickets turned out to be rocky areas. Kicking a few stones around or just walking in a circle is generally enough to send several of them jumping… to their doom. The boy is surprisingly proficient at grabbing them with his bare hands and somehow not crushing them. I prefer to chase them with one hand so they jump into the sawed-off plastic bottle I’m holding in the other. We can usually catch about 10 crickets in a couple minutes.
What surprised me is how quickly Kina and Nina devour these freshly captured crickets. As soon as I drop them into the aquarium it’s a feeding frenzy of flashing tails and lunging attacks. The boy and I are always lying on our bellies to enjoy the show, and even Wife has been watching with us lately. These wild crickets have so much more energy and spring to their step – it’s no wonder they excite the leopard geckos.
It reminds me of a point made in the book The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Meat and vegetables are often treated as commodities, but not all carrots nor pigs are alike. The diet and lifestyle of an animal have enormous impact on the nutritional content, not to mention taste, of the meat. Paying more for free range pork or organic vegetables from a local farm hardly seems expensive when you think about the difference in what you are getting compared with industrial meat and vegetables.
I hope Kina and Nina won’t stop eating completely when go back to Tokyo and have to feed them store-bred crickets.