CONTRIBUTED FROM: Joe Ballenger (author)

I cleaned out my lobster roach enclosure today, so I figured I'd show y'all how to do this.

First, you need to take into account how you keep your roaches. I keep mine on eggcrates and toilet paper tubes, more tubes than crates. Always take the toilet paper tubes out first. To do this, give it one good shake. The roaches should all fall back into the tank.

Before:

After:

If you shake the tube vigorously, the roaches could fly off. Using the 'one hard shake' method ensures the roaches all end up back in the tank.

There really isn't a good method of getting them off the eggcrates, but I just tapped them off by shaking the crate upside down over the tank.

After I cleaned off all the paper parts, this is what the bottom of the tank looked like:


You can see the dead adults mixed among the frass. The colored rings are caps from bottled tea (about twice the height of a milk cap) that have been in there ever since I started the colony.

To lure the adults to the other side of the tank, I simply used some rice left over from last night's dinner.

Don't ask me how I managed to burn rice...it's a long story.


With the adults occupied, I simply scooped out the frass into a ziploc bag.

However, there's one major problem with this which every person who owns a roach colony must consider. Actually, in my case...there's about 10,000.

How do you seperate the nymphs from the frass?

There's one incredibly easy way to do this...

...you don't.

I simply placed two paper towel tubes in with the nymphs and frass. Every 10 minutes, the insides of these tubes cover themselves in nymphs. I simply shake them back into the tank with the adults.

Here's the bag:

It remains to be seen whether or not the roaches will chew through the bag, but there's no shortage of the types of airtight containers you could use.

I need to start doing this very same thing today.
-Eddy