Introduction

Wood roaches (or woodies for short) are also often called the lobster roach and speckled feeder roach. This is the best roach to breed for feeding reptiles as they are clean and produce very quickly and don’t fly. Wood roaches can live up to 2 years of age and mature between 3-4 months old on the right diet and temperature.

Female roaches are parthenogenesis which means they can produce eggs (ootheca) without a male present. You will end up breeding more females than males as female roaches choose the smaller weaker males to breed with. It is believed they are able to do this so they can produce more females and less big dominant males.

Female roaches give birth to live young as they carry their ootheca inside them to increase survival rate. Each ootheca has between 26-40 eggs, 24 hours before hatching she will expose her ootheca behind her carrying it around until they hatch. All the babies will stay with mum for the next 48 hours before venturing off from mum.

Female Woodie (Below)

Housing your woodies.

Woodies like to be kept warm and at the right temperature they will thrive. 30 degrees is perfect though anywhere between 25-35 is okay cold temps they will stop moving and breeding and go dormant. Heating is not needed in the summer period though if you live in a cooler climate you may need heating if these temps can’t be reached. To help keep them at a good constant temp a heat cord is a good option. All you need is a 15 watt heat cord and some electrical tape to tape it to the under side of your storage tub. Tape it on by weaving it only over half of the tub so they have a cooler end if they wish.

Woodies have huge appetites so all left over kitchen scraps are ideal to feed your woodies. I feed my woodies apples, pumpkin, carrot, cabbage and cat or dog biscuits and rat pellets.Woodies can go a month without any food but cannot go more than 1 week without water. There is a lot of different ways to give them water, you can use lids with wet tissues or water crystals or my preference is oranges and mandarins. I feed each tub of woodies half a orange or a whole mandarin every 3rd night for added water. I have found this to be one of their favourite foods and dose not last long in with them. There’s not much that woodies don’t eat, you can try experimenting with other foods and you may find something they really enjoy. Go through the tub every 2 days and just take out any rotting food or any dead woodies you may find to prevent disease.

To start your colony you will need somewhere to house them. I use 60 litre storage tubs.Woodies are expert climbers so to prevent any escapees i paint a 50mm bead of fluon around the top of my tubs. Fluon or roach stopper is a Teflon based paint that the roaches can’t climb up its available from good online herp shops. After it dries you can then stack some egg carton up one end, not higher than the Teflon paint though. You can make layers by using flat pieces in between the egg cartons. You will not need any substrate for roaches as waste quickly builds up. About 1000 mixed or adult woodies are a good amount to start off with. I do a full clean out every few months and take out all the woodies.This is a long process as you will have to keep stacking egg cartons in the original tub until all woodies are caught out.

Now you should have your woodie colony up and running and in no time at all you will have thousands.

Woodie Setup