If you frequently feed Dubia roaches to your reptiles, you have probably noticed they are extremely hard or impossible to find at the moment. So, you may be asking yourself why? Hearing about a colony crash due to a freeze out or illness may not make a whole lot of sense to you as to why you can’t get any now or even in the near future.
Understanding the life cycle and needs of a Dubia roach may help answer the questions you have and give you a better understanding of why there is such a long wait on being able to purchase these popular feeder insects.
Dubia roaches are a tropical species of cockroach that are not native to North America. When temperatures fall too low they cannot survive. Dubia roaches thrive at temperatures ranging from 80 degrees to 95 degrees. So, when we say our supplier’s colonies have crashed due to a freeze out this means that their breeding colonies have died out due to conditions too cold for their roaches to survive.
Now that we covered why a die out can happen, let us look at why it takes so long after a colony crash to establish a new breeding colony. It takes a newly hatched Dubai roach, also known as a nymph, 3 to 4 months to grow to maturity or breeding size. Each female roach only produces about 25 nymphs per breeding cycle. A cycle is a 2-month process with a 4-week gestation period. This is why when a colony crashes (dies out) it can take over 6 months to establish a new one.
Now think about this process on a much larger scale and how many Dubia roaches a supplier would need to produce to meet the basic demands of their business accounts (the stores that supply to the general public). I think it safe to say that this is no small feat for a distributor that has demands to supply millions of roaches to retailers.
Hopefully you now have a better understanding as to why the wait is such a long one. We ask that you please be patient while nature takes it course and let us help you find alternative feeder options for your beloved pets.
As always, here at Northwoods Pets, from feathers to fur to fins and scales, we love all pets!