I've noticed that a lot of care sheets/guides have been urging the use of powdered food for roaches, incorporating as many as 12 different ingredients, some of them thrown in to appease what appears to be the desire to make our pet's/feeder's diets match some idealized human "health kick."
Roth mentions in his book Cockroaches: Ecology, Behavior, and Natural History that some species (I believe it was Blattella germanica) select foods to eat based on what nutrients they need. If this is the case, it may be detrimental to a colony's productivity to feed powdered foods, which provide a bombardment of nutrients instead of the ones the roaches would naturally select.
Roth also mentioned that other roaches (I believe the example this time was Periplaneta americana) will select novel foods over known ones in order to determine if the new food contains something more beneficial than the old food item had. If this is true, then blended diets also prevent this behavior, which could also be detrimental to colony health.
Now, this may not be important on a small scale, but I realize that some species such as Blaptica dubia are bred on an increasingly larger scale nowadays. For somebody trying to maximize production, if 1,000 adult females are producing only 20 babies each per litter instead of 25 due to being fed a blended diet, that is a loss of 5000 babies that could be used to feed hungry animals!
Discuss!!!!
Roth mentions in his book Cockroaches: Ecology, Behavior, and Natural History that some species (I believe it was Blattella germanica) select foods to eat based on what nutrients they need. If this is the case, it may be detrimental to a colony's productivity to feed powdered foods, which provide a bombardment of nutrients instead of the ones the roaches would naturally select.
Roth also mentioned that other roaches (I believe the example this time was Periplaneta americana) will select novel foods over known ones in order to determine if the new food contains something more beneficial than the old food item had. If this is true, then blended diets also prevent this behavior, which could also be detrimental to colony health.
Now, this may not be important on a small scale, but I realize that some species such as Blaptica dubia are bred on an increasingly larger scale nowadays. For somebody trying to maximize production, if 1,000 adult females are producing only 20 babies each per litter instead of 25 due to being fed a blended diet, that is a loss of 5000 babies that could be used to feed hungry animals!
Discuss!!!!
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