Red Runner /Turkish Roaches
Blatta Lateralis:
The other common names for this feeder are Turkish roach or rusty red roach. These guys are smaller than Dubia and Discoid, adults are the size of a large crickets and nymphs can be as small as 1/8 of an inch. These guys are faster than Dubia roaches but nowhere near as fast as some people make them out to be.
Red Runners are very nutritious as they have a high meat to shell ratio containing 37% protein and 6% fat making them very similar to a cricket nutritionally while being much easier and cleaner to keep.
They grow quickly if kept between 85 and 90°, but can be kept at current size for quite a while at 70°.
Adult red runners are about an inch long. I use forceps to feed them to my animals.
We recommend them for middle-size to large geckos, agamids, large anole species, and lacertidae. The nymphs and smaller roaches can be fed to almost anything. Even Bearded dragons have fun chasing them down. (Although some Leopard geckos just can’t seem to catch up to them, fun to watch though)
If they are too fast for your animals, simply crush them a little. Many lizards are excited by the smells of red runner juices and that will trigger feeding in many cases.
The Red Runners are some of the closest to looking like crickets for those lizards that have been on a steady diet of crickets making the switch easier. They need to be ‘gut loaded’ and sprinkled with calcium like you do with the crickets, but are much easier and quieter to keep.
Let me say this yet again, we do not ‘do’ crickets. They are noisy, messy, hard-ish to keep a healthy colony and there are many other beetles and roaches out there that do just as well without the problems. (Even hear the occasional story where crickets try to eat the lizard they are supposed to be food for.)
Prices Red Runners
Red runner Roach mixed 1 doz 12 $2.74 + .21 = $2.95
5 doz 60 $11.00 + .85 = $11.85
Please see the 'Price list' page for full list of prices and sizes
