COCKROACH AND CRICKET SNACKS

COCKROACH AND CRICKET SNACKS

Not many people realise what it takes to make sure all of the animals at Taronga Zoo are fed the appropriate diet. With many species, this needs to include live vertebrates, or insects. That doesn’t mean a fly here and there or a cricket or two. We are talking in the tens of thousands and tens of kilos.In any week in our ‘Bug House’ Taronga’s keen and steel-stomached keepers actively breed and raise cockroaches, crickets and flies that are then divided out between sections to be included in the complex diets of many species of native and exotic animals. This means that a typical week’s consumption includes 300 cockroaches, 13,000 crickets, 5kgs of Maggots, 16kgs of fly pupae and 18kgs of Meal Worms.It's definitely not your ordinary day in the office as the smell in the ‘Bug House’ is never a pleasant one and the sound of tens of thousands of crickets combined with constant tropical humidity is enough to turn most people away from food production for life. So we do thank those dedicated keepers who keep the creepy-crawlies coming. By: Zoo Communications