For lizard owners you want to feed your beloved Panther Chameleons, Bearded Dragons, and Leopard Geckos the best diet to make sure they live a long, happy life. For owners of insectivorous lizards that means presenting a tasty plate of crickets for the dinner of their scaly pets. However, that means feeding your cherished reptile live crickets. This story of a man unleashing an accidental cricket invasion in his own house is a nightmare scenario for lizard owners everywhere and it was gloriously documented on Twitter for all to enjoy.
Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham tweeted out the story of ordering live crickets online and opening the box only to unleash a cricket horde in his house that rivaled the locust swarm in Egypt from the Bible.
So, a shipment of crickets for the lizard arrived via FedEx today. It was my first time ordering bulk crickets off the internet, and I naively assumed that they would be in like, a bag or some other contraption to facilitate easy transfer to another container. They were not.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
They were in a cardboard box. And I cut the tape and opened the box and SURPRISE! Crickets everywhere. It was the middle of the workday and I didn't have time to deal with cricket logistics, so I put the tape back on the box.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
About 20 minutes later I'm back at work on my computer, and I hear my wife in the kitchen: "where are these goddamn crickets coming from." I freely admit I had not kept her fully up-to-date on my cricket purchasing plans.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
With the benefit of hindsight, this was a mistake.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
I say "That's a good question. Let me check something." I walk over to the bathroom. I open the door. There are crickets. Everywhere.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
For some reason my first instinct is to flush the toilet, as if that will do anything to solve the problem of crickets in all the other places that were not the toilet. I shut the door. "Uh, don't come in here!" I try to sound cheerful.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
Of course by this point many had migrated elsewhere. They were in the closet. In the shoes. Making their way downstairs to the playroom. The cats were having what I can only imagine was the greatest day of their lives.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
I make this information public because if I do not send any tweets tomorrow, it is because my wife murdered me after finding a cricket in our bed in the middle of the night.
And that's the news from Red Lake Falls.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2018
The moral of the story is to buy your damn crickets from the pet store on not online.
[Mediaite]