can anyone tell me what this bug is? it came with some crickets i got a couple days ago and i was wondering if its going to turn into anything that my cham can eat or should i throw it out?
strange to see that that is because i found one of those in our cricket bin once (i clean the bins all the time) and my roomate fed it to his bearded dragon with no ill effects. I'd also like to see if anyone knows what it is.
It's basically a dermestid beetle. Maybe not the exact thing, but friends who've used them to strip carcasses of flesh have said these were esentially deremestids.
Scavenging bettles, they live in cricket colonies and eat the dead. Most reptiles spit them out because of the hairs, but some releish them - agamids in particular, I've been told. Basilisks love them.
I've used them - right out of the cricket bin - to strip the bones of some of my unsucessful breeding projects... do a good job, too. As do superworms, surprisingly.
toss it out. they throw their hairs as a defense mechanism and can be irritating to your cham. Once adult, the beetles feed on just about anything organic and if you have more than one and they mate you can never get rid of them and they can be quite destructive. Not worth keeping around unless you have a lot of carcasses to strip like Eric