r/roaches

Hello! I have recently got into keeping dubia roaches as both feeders and pets. That being said, I have some questions!

1. How to tell when a female is pregnant? I know they have pouches, but after almost half an hour trying to find images of a pregnant female, I couldn't really find anything at all.

2. How often should I feed my colony of about ~10?

3. What fruits & vegetables are toxic/bad in general for them?

4. How to tell males and females apart? I know how to if they're adults, but is it possible to tell them apart as sub adults, like males being darker or lighter or different patterns?

5. To clarify something, dubia roaches are legal in my country, I made a post about this in a different subreddit and they deleted it due to them thinking I was trying to breed & keep illegal feeders, definitely not the case here!

6. I know I could look these up, but I really do prefer listening to people that have actually kept dubias and do keep dubias since they're definitely more reliable than a AI search engine!

I got 5 hissing roaches from Petco, and I got them a 10 gallon tank with a mesh lid. I still want to be extra careful that they don’t escape however, so I put some heavy books on top. But I also read that some people use petroleum jelly on the top of the lid to keep them from climbing, I don’t have any atm (I don’t mind buying some though) but I was just wondering if I could use coconut oil instead since I happen to have that. Or would it not even be necessary with the books and the mesh lid? Thanks!

Every time this comes up someone trots out that red runners are an infestation risk and dubia are the only safe feeder, and I think that's lazy. Red runners, blatta lateralis, can't climb smooth surfaces and they only glide, they don't truly fly, and the colonies that supposedly take over a house basically never materialize because they need consistent heat and humidity to breed that a typical home doesn't provide. People have run runner colonies for fifteen plus years without an escape problem. The real tradeoff is different from the scare story.

Where dubia win is size and slow movement, which makes them easy to feed off and great for larger animals, and they hold gut load beautifully. Where runners win is breeding speed and activity. Red runner roaches reach feeder size faster than dubia and they almost never stop moving, which matters a lot if your animal won't strike something sedentary. For sourcing I've ordered both from Dubia.com and from MiceDirect, and the runners I got from MiceDirect arrived livelier, though Dubia.com's dubia size selection is broader if you want specific sizes. Neither is the universal answer, they solve different problems, and the "runners are dangerous" line should die.