I STILL need to start a colony :dry:

Sexing lobster roaches
lobster roach


So basically your shrew is eating you out of roaches, if you take it 10 roaches over 30days you feeding 300 roaches to your shrew and you only have 900 roaches!

There is no chance that they have enough time to breed!
You need to leave them for a good 6months to a year to get the colony up and running.

Most roaches have a gestation period of 30days.
So if you have to feed them off you will never have new nymph coming into the container.

Meteor wrote: They were eating carrots and potatoes until I saw Peter's post...
They are on egg cartons and there is an heater behind the box. I have never given them water but the food lays in water before feeding - it will stay fresh longer.

To be blunt and to the point and hopefully not too rude but the food in this photo is a total waste of time, money and effort and the egg cartons are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Roaches mouth parts are designed to eat SOFT foods and NOT the whole hard biscuits that seem to be in the tub. The biscuits need to be dumped in the bin and some high protein cat crunchies (like THESE ) need to be ground down into powder so the roaches can eat the powdered crunchies easily (I use an old coffer grinder) and those egg cartons need to be stood upright and the entire container needs to be covered with them like in my photos.
I have a 35in x 12in heatmat on 24/7/365 no matter what the outside temps are because to breed roaches they need to be HOT 24/7. If the shrew eats that many roaches, you need to get some turks asap. Get as many as you can afford as the more you start with, the more they will breed and you will soon have more than you need.

I feed all my roach species with dog pellets and fresh food and I don't grind the pellets up. Even the little nymphs can chomp on them. Maybe dry cat food is harder, so it probably boils down to the consistency of dry food used.

I suppose if your room temp. is 30 deg plus in summer, you can save some power on your eat pads and keep them off during the day.

@ Meteor, Put your heat mat straight under the roach bin. They will benefit from this!

Expensive cat and dog food is soft,made like that for a reason, that is why it is expensive and got the pets care in mind, the cheaper off the floor product is harder.

Like today, it is a bit nippy this morning and last night, so to help you can have your heating pads on!

I only recently got my dubai's as some of you know.
I feed them cat food pellets and within a week they ate up all pellets that I threw in. I trew in 3 hands full. I would then think I don't have a problem with too hard food items.
I also feed them apples and oranges and they eat everything up.Oranges they are crazy of.

It is the last couple of days also chilly here in Bloem. Last night I switched on the heating mat and felt this morning it doesn't really make a difference when stuck on the side. I want to run past you guys if I must not rather put it below the container. If it is struggling now to make heat on the side it will only become worse as winter starts. i know it will work better below the box.
It is one of those 15W tin foil type heating mats.