Husbandry, Housekeeping & General Maintenance

The husbandry and maintenance of your invertebrates is one of the most important factors in the success of any invert keeper, and over the years we have learnt and honed many skills from others and our own experience that we wish to pass on to you.

This guide is a generic approach that we find fits with what we do, you may find you want to adjust things for yourself.

Housing

Almost anything can be used to house your invertebrates, depending on the species of course and we try to reuse and recycle items as much as possible.

We have and still do use

A variety of glass enclosures, vivariums & terrariums
A variety of plastic enclosures, vivariums & terrariums
Sweet jars
Buckets with fitted lids
Plastic boxes
Netted enclosures, especially the pop up ones
Cardboard boxes

We have found that plastic is generally the best due to being light weight, relatively cost effective, sturdy, hardy and very reusable.

Using and recycling/up-cycling plastic is the best way to use what is essentially an unwanted product in nature. It is also much easier to ventilate plastic.

Ventilation is imperative to any enclosure so the inverts have access to fresh air and to circulate the air of the enclosure. Making sure that whatever is being housed cannot escape out of any ventilation holes is just as important.

Substrate

There are so many substrates out there and it can be very confusing as to what to use for what invert, however, we have found a very simple and straight forward solution. We believe that a substrate should be used as much as possible, even when breeding roaches on mass for sale, invertebrates don't live on/in egg crates or cardboard of any variety!

Our basic mix is

Leaf litter (70%) as a base
Peat moss (30%) to hold moisture

That's it, we use this in pretty much all of our enclosures, with the exception of animals in netted enclosures or mantids in cups.

We may adjust this mix depending on the invertebrates requirements using the addition of coco coir and/or moss and perhaps some decaying deciduous white wood.

Our only exception is when raising beetle larvae, in this instance we will use 100% leaf litter for our Pachnoda, other beetle larvae species will require different mixes

A lot of of inverts will actually eat the leaf litter and so this is a natural food source.

If you do not have access to leaf litter, then play around with other organic matter that suits your needs. You can be buy these from invert suppliers or garden centres - make sure that no chemicals or pesticides of any kind have been used if purchasing from garden centres or alike.

What is in our leaf litter?

We use any or a mixture of decaying oak, beech or sweet chestnut leaves.

NOTE:

It is important to ensure that no pine/coniferous matter in in your substrate/leaf litter as it can be toxic to many inverts

NOTE:

It is illegal to take anything from nature without land owners permission as per Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981

Sterilising your leaf litter or other organic materials

By sterilising your leaf litter, you are killing off all of the vital nutrition that is contained within, this makes the leaf litter useless for beetle larvae and becomes poor quality for any other invert that will consume it.

There is no need to be concerned with pests or parasites in the leaf litter that will cause harm to any of the exotic inverts that we keep. This is specific to the UK, we are unable to give opinions on other countries.

Temperature & Humidity

Most of the time your inverts will be happy in room temperature (20 - 22ºC / 68 - 72ºF), if heat mats are used, they should only be applied to the side.

Humidity is something that many people get confused over, humidity is not water, it is vapour/moisture in the air. Moisture is always in the air but will vary depending on other factors, humidity is created by adding water to the substrate and evaporating into the air.

To allow humidity to flow through your enclosure and to prevent stagnant air accumulating, ventilation would ideally be places about an inch above the substrate as well as on the top of the enclosure - as the moisture evaporates it rises and sucks in fresh air creating a flow of moisture and fresh air.

Food

Knowing what food to feed your invertebrate will depend greatly on what species it is and while we could go on forever with just the different orders, let alone the different genus with in that order or even species in that genus, so please check our care sheet for each animal we have listed for specifics on that species.

Less is always more we have discovered and feeding less but often is a better practice, and this way you can provide a range of foods. Variety is key to having strong and healthy invertebrates. Feeding less and often also helps to reduce the numbers of fruit flies in our bug house.

All of our inverts are fed with high quality food even our feeder insects.

Cleaning

Every now and then you will need to clean out an enclosure and change the substrate and when doing so, it is good practice to make up a new enclosure first and to move the inverts over, empty the old enclosure and dispose of any organic matter correctly, please ensure that no non indigenous species is released into your native country! We will try our very best to save any live invertebrates, eggs, ootheca or pupa and then we freeze the substrate for about 24-48 hours then we dispose of it.

The container is then scrubbed clean, rinsed and allowed to dry ready for the next use.

When feeding, it is always a good idea to spot check and remove any dead insects, anything moulding or anything that shouldn't be in the enclosure.