I have never had a problem like this before so I'm coming here to ask the experts if I'm suddenly doing something wrong.
In the past I kept my crickets in a 5gallon fish tank with a fish tank carbon filter as the lid held down by a mesh lid. This keeps airflow but also removes almost all smells that can come from these nasty creatures. It actually works wonders... but thats not the problem. I use'd to use the t-rex feeder gut loader cricket food and that gelled water and the crickets were loving it. I wouldn't need to clean the cage until I had used all the crickets. Usually the day of the last feeding was the same day I got more crickets, so I'd just clean the tank before putting the new ones in.

But Now I'm all out of the gelled water and gut loader so I tried using just carrots. I'd cut up a whole carrot and put the pieces in the tank with the crickets. FOUR DAYS LATER the paper towel was soaking wet along with the cardboard egg carton and there was white mold growing in the corner of the paper towel! So I chucked everything out and cleaned the tank with a 10% bleach and water solution and bought more crickets. I thought that the reason was because I placed the carrots right on the paper towel so this time I only used half a carrot and placed the pieces on some plastic wrap. that was two days ago and looking at it today its already moving towards molding like last time.

What the heck am I doing wrong?
Please any help would be grateful, otherwise I'll go back to using the gut loader and gelled stuff but they are kind of expensive.

I forgot to mention that in both cases there were many dead crickets. Many last time, I'd guess cause of the mold, and a few looking at it today. I'm afraid to feed these crickets for my chams. I've been feeding my cresteds baby food with the crested diet food mixed in so they have been feed but the only thing I've been able to feed my chams has been non-gutloaded crickets (feeding the day I bring home the crix from the store).

Yeah...the moisture will kill the crix. i dunno but I haad problems with carrot for some reason.decomposes pretty quick I think... I have found potatoe to work best...cut one in half and leave it with the skin touching dry ground...don't let the open side touch anything. Hope this helps a bit...other than that....others I am sure will have better ideas

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I agree, I used to use potatoe wedges in a small tupperwear sandwich container so that it would not soak the edges of the container or the surrounding cardboard. I had pretty good luck with that, a friend of mine told me not to use carrots becuase of exactly what you said, so I never tried them.

Hopefully the potatoe works out, the other thing that my old HS bio teacher used to do was put small amounts of plain dry oat meal in the tank with the crickets, I am not sure what effect that has on the crickets or the animals that eat them, I never tried it, but his animalls are all really old and he has done that forever.

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TKE:TT:118

Thanks!
I got potatoes and oatmeal. The real cooking oatmeal, not that instant stuff with all the sugar. Hopefully that will keep things cleaner.

My crix get all my leftovers from dinner, and for water I use wet cotton in a shallow dish

I use carrots and haven't had any problems yet...I put mine on a peice of burlap over the substrate. As long as its not touching no mold, I could just be lucky though.

knoxx gelatin and ground otmeal plain thats the cheapest and we use it at the store I work at. That has worked great for me but if u want u can buy potatoes but the knoxx gelatin works best.

Well feeding them oatmeal only keeps them alive, and since the crix are being fed to our herps we wanna gutload them...so you shouldnt only feed them oatmeal, the better the diet of the crix the heallthier they will be...and nice healthy crix makes for a nice healthy herp

i have found the best stuff to gutload crix with is fish food...the flakes. This really gets em full of goodness... that with the potataoe should be good! Plus fish food is dry so it aint so messy.... the crix also love eating the stuff....but then again crix eat anything...lol

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