Consistency is so important when raising any kind of organism for production. I’ve said it before on this blog, but it’s so important to have consistent inputs to expect predictable outputs. This is certainly the case with the crickets this morning. When I entered the cricket castle (okay, it’s a tent), it felt kind of cool inside. The thermometer showed it was 65F in the day time and the nights were getting down to 55F inside the tent… ahem, “castle”. It’s supposed to be about 84-88F, but one of the heaters had shut off on it’s own. As a result, the crickets have been surviving and not thriving. I use this phrase a lot when discussing the health of plants, but it works very well in this instance. Just because something is alive and looks “okay”, it may just be that the organism is close to it’s breaking point and has not presented the symptoms just yet. The little troopers were hanging in there, though. I was especially concerned with the new crop of babies as they are a delicate bunch. Everything seems okay with them, but they’re pretty small so it’s hard to truly know until they get a little bigger to see what the numbers look like. At these temperatures, breeding stops as I learned all too well back in September. The solution to this is to have a monitoring and alarm system that calls you when a set point is not being met. Or, for simplicity, just another reliable heater in the room. Although, if this is your livelihood, I’d highly suggest an alarm.