Feeding response with roaches?

[Michael]

I'd love to get the feedback from other folks about feeding response with roaches... mine has always been so-so, and I stopped breeding them a few years ago for that reason.

Babies and juvies would eat them pretty readily, but as soon as geckos hit that ~20-25g mark, they stopped eating roaches and would even spit them out. I had a few lone geckos who would take the occasional roach, but the feeding response with crickets was much stronger.

Has anyone else had this experience? Do your chewies take roaches readily - and maybe mine are just spoiled or something?

 

[Darnell05]

My experience with roaches as had mixed results. I can tong feed babies and young juvies. I could probably do that with adults also but I get a little lazy to keep them trained (sounds weird, but I think it's possible). The issue I notice is adults like to hunt or respond to movement. Dubia can be lazy as hell which affects the feeding response. In the past I have used a white dish with a piece of carrot or two so the roaches are constantly moving and eating. The adult shave done better under those conditions.

 

[Romans832]

We feed Red Runners & Dubia in cups.
Our Chahoua have done great on them!
Except the one that was raised on crickets all her life
That's a bummer

 

[MelissaSR]

I raise our chahouas on dubia but I have found that at 20g their interest drops. My adults will eat them but not with as much vigor as they do crickets. So from hatching to around 20g they get dubia only, then after that they tend to switch over to crickets mostly with dubias supplemented in when they will take them. When I do feed them though they are placed in a cup with a bit of food in it like Darnell does, however I just add a couple of drops of CGD instead of carrot. When they are first added to the tank they get eaten quickly, but if nobody decides to wake up for feeding they don’t bother with them

 

[KatieBKMG]

Both our Chahoua(25gF and 40gM) will take anything that moves in front of their face; and it doesn't seem like that will stop any time soon. Usually it's a dubia roach or superworm, but they have had crickets, silkworms, and hornworms as well.
*We tong feed both of them so they associate the tongs with bug and the actual bug does not have to make much movement.

 

[Dragonborn Exotics (Ryan)]

I have similar experiences to chahoua losing interest in roaches. Mine usually happens in the 30-40 gram range. What usually happens is the chahoua will grab the roach from the tongs and start munching on it slowly and then spit it out. Not sure if it was the food that the roaches were fed, if the roaches were too big for the chahoua. So i pretty much stopped feeding them because it takes a lot longer to tong feed dubia than it does to dump some crickets in and watch them go to town.
I have always tong fed because I never had a good response with putting them in dishes. Only have luck sometimes when I put little roaches in dishes for the baby chahoua.

 

[TroysGeckos]

When I experemented with Dubia Roaches, I found that hatchling/young juvenile Chahoua ate them readily but adults were far less interested.

 

[Darnell05]

Tong feeding juvies and hatchlings came easy, I was definitely too lazy to tong feed the adults. I tried leaving them in shallow dishes or containers but dubia can be extremely inactive which doesn't bode well for the predation factor of chahoua. I've dropped a carrot in the dishes to stimulate movement and it worked well but at this point in time, I prefer crickets.