At university, I had pet frogs. I just adored them but I had a side project too. I kept crickets to feed my frogs. The funny thing was that I found keeping crickets just as interesting (perhaps even more so) than frogs. Â They always appear in a hurry, they make beautiful sounds that put you to sleep at night and they’re really fun to watch. Â I knew I wanted my children to experience pet crickets too.
Why keep pet crickets?
Crickets make great pets for families, classrooms and even kindergartens. Here’s why:
- They’re readily available in pet shops
- They’re easy to maintain
- These crickets don’t bite you, so it’s perfectly safe for little fingers to do the feeding and cleaning
- You can get hands on by holding them. You just have to be quick!
Cricket Facts
Keeping crickets will teach you a lot about them. It’s perfect for children who love insects or are learning about minibeast. Here’s what they can learn:
- Generally, only the male crickets chirp. They don’t use their mouth or legs to make the noise but their wings.
- Females have an ovipositor (the long stick-like body part at the end of her abdomen)
- Males have two wings and no ovipositor
- The males chirp to find a mate
- The females lay their eggs in damp dirt by pushing their ovipositor into the dirt. They can lay up to approx. 10 eggs a day.
- Insects have a head, thorax and abdomen and six legs
- Crickets shed their exoskeleton when they need to grow
Where can you buy crickets
Reptiles are becoming very popular as pets, and so pet shops supply containers of crickets (as food) anywhere from $10 – $15. Won’t it feel nice to walk in there and save some crickets from being fed to lizards? Instead they will live out their lives being well fed and taken care of by you!
What you need to keep crickets
- Live crickets
- A plastic enclosure like this works well.
- Two small containers, one for food and one for water (bottle caps are the perfect size)
- Paper towel
- Toilets rolls or objects placed in their enclosure to allow them to hide
- A small container filled with moist dirt or sand (to allow the female to play her eggs)
- Food: vegetables and a dog biscuit (they do need a little bit of meat or they’ll start to eat each other). You can also buy specifically made cricket food from pet shops. They also like fish food too. Â A varied diet is good for the health of your crickets.
If you like crickets, you may also be interested in keeping meal worms too!
The set up for a pet cricket
Put some paper towel on the bottom of the enclosure. This makes it easier to keep the enclosure clean. Just replace the paper towel every 3-4 days. In the enclosure, place the container filled with sand and the objects that will allow the crickets to hide. Make sure the sand stays damp if you want baby crickets one day (see below to learn more about breeding).
Add a wet tissue to the container you’ve got for water. Crickets can drown in water, so it’s best to keep the tissue moist and replace it when it starts to turn brown. Add in their food container too. Â Now you’re ready. Let your children add the crickets by gently tipping them in.
 Pet Cricket Tips
- Remember to wash your vegetables. Insecticides will kill your crickets.
- Using insecticides around the home can kill your crickets too. Put them outside if you’re spraying chemicals.
- Crickets don’t like extreme cold or extreme heat. Try to keep them in a location with a fairly constant temperature. A heat lamp (you could use your study light) can encourage them to breed.
- You can breed crickets. It’s not as hard as you think. Check out that link. The babies are tiny and very cute.
- Keep them in a dry environment.
- It’s important to remove any dead crickets you find.
- Always get your children to wash their hands after cleaning, feeding and playing with the crickets.
Keeping pet crickets has been a lot of fun. For the first time though, the girls have been a little more nervous to hold this animal. I’m surprised because they loved holding the mealworms when we had them as pets. Â Still, they do love watching them and letting me hold them close to their faces so they can have a good look. We’re going to try breeding them next. Â Fingers crossed I’ll have a few baby photos to show you soon!
Would you keep pet crickets?
Isn’t it interesting what children will/won’t hold. Miss Daisy wouldn’t hold caterpillars for the longest time but held a cicada shell immediately without hesitation! I would’ve thought cicada’s looked more threatening than the 3mm caterpillar she was offered!
These look like a really fun pet and thanks for showing the difference between male and female – always so interesting and informative!
I know. I must admit if I let them hold, I think they could possibly let them escape (all of them) or squish them. So perhaps at their ages, it’s best left at observing!
Sometimes they will surprise you with how gentle they can be. If you discuss with them these insects have a soft body and can easily be squished and that would make them die, they will be careful.
We need to treat them like the competent human beings they are. And YES and cricket or two might experience death BUT that is a learning experience the children will learn from.
As far as the fear of the crickets getting loose, make it an outdoor experience. If they get loose, the children could learn how to recapture them (or not) and again it is a valuable lesson about being careful and having a bit more responsibility placed on them and they will learn from these hands-on lessons!
Try it… Your students will thank you for it! 🙂
The type of crickets that come from the pet store are either Asian house crickets, Jamaican field crickets, or now the Asian banded crickets have taken favor. But none are native and should never be released outdoors as they can have how know what impact on our native ecology.
A little feeder cricket history for context, Asian house crickets were the common ones for years until some kind of cricket paralysis virus started wiping them out. The demand of reptile hobbyists needing to feed their lizards caused quite a stir for some replacement and Jamaican field crickets were popularized for a while, sometimes called “super crickets” as they were larger. But their larger size also cam with bigger mandibles and some smaller lizards were having their toes bit and injured a few people even reported being nipped (no harm really but they could give you a pinch). And now the Asian banded crickets, very good nutritionally, have taken favor. But had crickets carrying that virus gotten loose who knows what havoc that could have caused here with our native insects. And the Jamaican variety being more hearty would also likely out compete natives and cause problems.
Anyway I enjoyed the article, all great advise for keeping and breeding crickets. And it’s great fun and can teach kids not to fear insects and appreciate nature. But if you want to recommend playing with crickets outdoors it would be best to just use local field crickets. Care is the same, they’re free and easy to catch, and if they escape they’re locals anyway.
Absolutely would! Thanks for this guide Penny.
I would definitely keep crickets, although I like grasshoppers better. Thanks for the information.
What a great idea Carmody! I’ll add that to my list. I used to breed grasshoppers for reptiles at my old zoo and I forgot all about it. It’s actually quite similar to keeping crickets. You just have to have a tall enclosure and add grass to the enclosure every couple of days. Also you put their sand in a cup, not a small container. They need it deep. Now I have to hunt for grasshoppers!
Yea! I will look forward to that post too!
What an awesome post – very informative. I know a few kids who would absolutely LOVE to do this :). Will be sharing on our page for sure.
We have had them before
I get the shivers & dont want to go near them but my son thinks they are the best. hes braver than me lol
They would make great classroom pets too! Do they live long?
Mr 8 would love his own pet. This may be it.
Wow, what a fun idea. I’d love to do this with my girls so they don’t grow up to be scared of bugs.
I have to be honest, crickets would freak me out a bit because I’d think they’d jump on me or something. I’m silly I know! Still love the idea though because I know kids would LOVE IT.
I LOVE this idea! My daughter will be thrilled to have another pet. Especially as we always talk about her early encounter with hearing crickets when we were camping. She was about 2 years old, and got excited when she heard them one night. She said, “I hear Trippets beeping!” We STILL call them “trippets” now! lol
They shall now always be known as trippets that’s adorable
I love the sound of crickets in the house. So pretty.
Oh my gosh, so do I Michele. It’s very relaxing.
Sometimes toilet rolls have sticky glue on them to keep the toilet paper on and the crickets could get stuck in the sticky stuff. Maybe mention in your in instructions to check the toilets rolls for glue or sticky stuff before using them for your crickets.
I too had crickets to feed my rescued house spider but he wasn’t keen on them and I found them more interesting than him! So now they are my pets and the spider has fruit flies. Thank you so much for your information; I found it at just the right time. I will be moving them into their larger enclosure when it arrives tomorrow. The females have just started to get their ovipositor – I thought there was something wrong with them when I first saw it! I read somewhere that the crickets will eat the babies when they emerge from the eggs. Did you find that? Should I remove the egg tray after a period of time, before the babies emerge, and put it in another enclosure? Thanks for your help.
Hi Andrea, yes, I did tend to move the babies out and away from the adults. If you need to keep them together, supply them with a little bit of crumbled dog food, it gives them an alternative to eating the babies.