The Curator of Crickets

Fresh out of college, I started my first paid zookeeping job in the Reptile Department of a large southern zoo.   I was excited beyond belief my first week on the job – I pictured myself feeding massive crocodiles, raking placidly among plodding giant tortoises, and caring for a kingdom of rare and extraordinary animals.  And I did a little of all of that… it’s just that most of my duties in those early days were confined to a small white room set off from the building’s kitchen.

It was in those days that I contemplated making business cards with a new title of my own creation – “Curator of Crickets.”

There were thousands of crickets, with thousands coming in every week.  They were sorted by size in various bins, divided for our feeding convenience.  There were the tiniest of “pinheads”, meant for feeding mantellas and dart frogs.  There were the one-inch giants, suitable prey for the frilled lizards, galliwasps, and other medium-sized lizards.  Tucked away among the later were the plastic shoeboxes of soil, where we hoped to induce the crickets to breed, providing us with more young crickets to feed out (we were rarely successful – flies seemed to always infest and ruin these nest boxes). 

Caring for crickets wasn’t glamorous, but it was essential to the well being of the collection, and I learned a lot of practical knowledge in those days.  How to unpack a cardboard box containing hundreds of crickets without them all escaping as soon as you lift the flap.  How to keep the colony clean – scraping all of the crickets into a huge pile, then placing food on the opposite end of the tank.  The live crickets would rush to claim it, leaving their droppings, their leftover food, and their dead behind in an easily cleaned pile.  Of greatest importance was learning to feed the crickets properly so that they themselves would become more nutritious food for our own animals, a process called “gut-loading”.

Nor were the crickets the only animals in the room that I was responsible for.  There were mealworms and their giant cousins, the superworms.  There were hissing cockroaches (spares from the insect keepers), a tank of minnows, and jars of fruit flies, crawling above the blue agar.  Recently, a tank of apple snails had been added, but these were reserved for the caiman lizards that were our curator’s pride and joy. 

And then there were the rodents.

Rats and mice were sorted in bins, much like the crickets.  The biggest were the giant rats, the size of a kitten.  The smallest were the pinkies, little naked balls of meat for our smallest snakes.  (Rabbits, guinea pigs, and once even a suckling pig graced our kitchen also, but they arrived deceased, and so required no care on my part).  While mammal prey was very rarely fed live (and then usually only to tempt a very picky eater, and then under the strictest supervision from the keeping staff), it was deemed preferable to acquire the rodents alive and fresh, dispatching them immediately prior to feeding them out.

Reptiles are a pretty low maintenance lot, provided heat and lightning and water quality are where you want them to be.  They eat far less than mammals of the same size; as a result, they poop less and require less clean-up.  The rats and mice, crickets and fruit flies, on the other hand, seemed to require endless cleanings, feedings, and fine-tunings.  It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that, even after I graduated to care of the actual collection animals, I still spent more time on that little white room than I did the rest of the animals in our sprawling building.

When you tell people that you are a zookeeper, they tend to get excited (or at least curious) and ask questions about it.  They tend to lose interest when you tell them that most of the animals you “keep” are insects and rodents (and snails!) meant to be fed to other animals.  While caring for feeder animals may not be the most glamorous or exciting of zoo jobs, it is still essential to providing for the care and well being of the animals in the collection.

It’s an important job, even if no one gives you a business card or fancy job title for doing it.