Best live food staple???

Hello everyone!

I bought a new, young emp a few weeks ago and started him on crickets (black, silent brown and banded) but all three were a bit too fast for him and were hard to catch. I have seen many times on different posts that roaches are good but they breed to quickly and he doesn't eat that much. Has anyone got any suggestions???

Thanks

Gut loaded crickets and/or roaches are generally deemed to be the best staple food for scorpions.

Setting up a roach colony for one scorpion is probably not worth the effort, unless you quite like the idea of breeding roaches anyway, so crickets are probably the easiest food source to obtain. A scorpion shouldn't have any trouble catching crickets, but if you are really worried that it's not getting enough food, remove the back legs of the crickets to slow them down abit when feeding them out.

I ordered some small locust because i heard that they're slower than crickets but they climb up everything and can probably get out of the tank so i might try crickets again. My only concern with crickets is that every tub i get, they all eat each other until i have about 2 left or they just die i leave plenty of food in the bigger tub that i transfer them into and they get a variety of different veg and fruit ect.
thanks for the tips , i'm definitely not setting up a roach colony, knowing me l'll end up with an infestation

EDIT..

Are locust as nutritious as crickets or are they not good for my emp as a staple?

I'm not sure on how nutritious locusts are compared to crickets, but crickets are the most widely used staple diet for scorpions.

I generally don't have a big problem with crickets munching each other. This is how I keep mine when I buy a box.

I use a roughly 30cm x 15cm kritter keeper for a box of medium/large brown crickets.

I lay a piece of newspaper on the bottom of the tank and add a few bits of egg crate stacked up at one side.

When I transfer the crickets from the little box into the tank I don't just pour them in. Instead I scoop out all the living crickets and leave the crap like dead crickets, 'wooly worms' (beetle larvae) and the adult beetles in the box.

As food, I use sliced potato, sliced orange with most of the juice squeezed out, sliced carrot and dog food biscuits. All of this food doesn't mould and turn to smelly mush and instead dries out, making it easy to clean out. The food is taken out and replaced with fresh every 2 days.

This will keep me with enough crickets to feed to most of my medium to large adult scorpions for 2 - 3 weeks.

Thanks

I have a large 30 x 30 tub that has the locust in so when i get rid of them i'll try crickets again and set it out similar to yours.

Thanks again!!!

utopianshadow19 wrote:

I ordered some small locust because i heard that they're slower than crickets but they climb up everything and can probably get out of the tank so i might try crickets again.

It's a good idea to always have a secure top on your scorpion tank. Not only will it prevent your scorpion from escaping, it will prevent other unwanted things (people, pets, pests, etc.) from getting in.

I have a secure lid but the tank has small vents in the side that are just big enough for the baby locust to crawl through but thanks for the advice