Roaches can live weeks and sometimes months without food, but they cannot survive long without water. While some species can adapt to low-moisture environments, other species struggle. This is particularly true of the Dubia roach.
Blaptica dubia is adapted for life in Central and South American rainforests, where water is abundant and nutrition often scarce. As such, they have mechanisms to deal with low-nutrition environments, but they require regular water. Whether you’re breeding Dubia roaches or just keeping a few around as feeders, you’ll need to provide a reliable source of moisture.
An in-depth guide to watering dubia roaches
This guide to watering Dubia roaches will show you how to do that. It contains information about watering methods, including the options and issues, and how to choose and implement one that’s right for you and your Dubia roach colony.
Contents
On the surface, this probably sounds pretty obvious. It makes sense that tropical insects require plenty of water, and in our experience, it is true that lack of hydration has a particularly negative effect on B. Dubia. However, with Dubia roaches, hydration is not just for sustaining a colony or a few bugs. The health of roaches and other feeder insects also has a direct effect on the animals that eat them.
Hydrated roaches are healthy roaches. They breed faster, live longer, and are more nutritious feeders. The bottom line is that you need abundant water to breed, raise, and even just sustain healthy Dubia roach feeders.
The good news is that providing water for Dubia roaches is fairly simple. There are numerous easy, inexpensive options, and this guide will help you decide which method is best for you. The following article is fairly long, so feel free to use it as a reference when you have hydration issues or questions.
Ultimately, deciding on a watering method is relatively straightforward once you understand your options. It’s figuring out the details about how, why, and when to use each method, as well as the relative advantages of each, that requires effort. But it’s all effort up-front, so you only have to do it once.
Why is hydration so important for Dubia roaches?
In short, hydration has a direct impact on the growth and reproduction of Dubia roaches. Dehydration and even sub-optimal hydration are causes of stress for insects. This forces them to divert internal resources to deal with the stress. These are resources that would have otherwise been used for growth, reproduction, repair, and even direct nutrition for your animals. Diverting resources from growth and reproduction to overcome stress diminishes the quality of feeder and breeder roaches. While compromises are inevitable and nothing is ever perfect, raising vigorous roaches that can handle unavoidable health and stress issues requires that you avoid problems that can be easily avoided. Dehydration is one such avoidable issue. The fewer physiological hurdles your Dubia have to jump, the better.
So, as a general rule, avoid causing roaches any unnecessary physiological stress. A colony might be healthy and capable of dealing with it, but you can never know for sure. All things equal, physically stressed insects are by definition less healthy than unstressed ones. And there is a correlation between health and productivity. Fortunately, dehydration and its accompanying stress are easily avoided.
The protein – uric acid connection
Dubia roaches are efficient protein processors. What they don’t use immediately may be stored as uric acid (pdf) (external link) for later use when times are lean. Using stored uric acid, or “non-protein nitrogen”, as it’s known, evolved as an adaptation to a low-protein environment. Dubia and some other roach species can even digest the cellulose in plant matter with the help of special bacteria growing in their guts. Talk about low protein! As byproducts of digestion, these bacteria produce nutrients the roaches can use. One of those nutrients is uric acid.
Uric acid appears to serve two purposes: first, it serves as a stored protein for on-demand energy when needed. Second, it regulates hydration. Urea salts retain water, which helps roaches survive in areas with scarce water resources.
So it seems uric acid helps Dubia roaches deal with scarcity. This makes intuitive sense. Roaches are scavengers after all. They rely on favorable environmental conditions outside their control to survive. Those who survive famine live to pass along their genes to future generations.
This is a successful strategy for roaches. It works well in the wild, but it doesn’t work nearly as well in captivity, where food and water are abundant. Captive Dubia roaches typically get way more protein than they need, and too much of the wrong protein at that.
Several things happen when Dubia roaches gorge on high-protein foods. Their tissues fill up with urea, more water is stored, and they become stressed. This is probably not a significant issue if they’re indulging in occasional high-protein meals, but protein is often regularly available in captivity. Results from the Mullins and Cochran uric acid study linked above show that uric acid steadily increases to unhealthy levels when American cockroaches are fed a diet containing 50% casein protein. And once high protein intake becomes established, it may be very difficult to reduce it. Among roaches loaded up on high protein for six weeks, only a protein-free diet brought uric acid levels back down. It actually rose further on just a 5% protein diet, albeit at a slower rate.
Practical implications
What does this mean for roach-keepers? The data suggest that excessive casein protein overloads the roach’s coping mechanism for scarcity. Uric acid is toxic at high levels. It causes gout, kidney stones, and, when severely overloaded, it can even cause death. We’ve seen this firsthand. When dietary protein reaches a certain level, the growth of Dubia roaches slows, fertility declines, and mortality rises. Before reaching overload, roaches will just store excess uric acid, and adequate hydration helps them process and flush excess metabolites and salts.
As an aside, the real solution to excess protein in the Dubia roach diet is to feed them less protein. Water helps them deal with the excess, but it is not a solution. We wrote a detailed article about the Dubia roach/dietary protein issue. Feel free to check it out if you want more information. For now, though—sticking with hydration—you want to support waste removal. One way to do that is by supplying plenty of water.
Humidity
Moderate to high humidity is important for Dubia roaches. They need it to help with molting, and reproduction slows when humidity dips too low. Consider that they come from a tropical rainforest and are adapted to that environment. They even have specialized sensors on their antennae that allow them to detect environmental humidity. They use these sensors to relocate to areas of higher humidity when they’re dehydrated.
If you’re keeping a few roaches as feeders, it’s probably not necessary to worry too much about maintaining a specific humidity level. However, if you’re keeping them for more than a month or want them to breed, maintain a humidity level of at least 40%. Higher is OK—perhaps even desirable—but lower probably isn’t. In our experience, Dubia roach reproduction declines along with humidity. A water source appropriate for your setup and situation can help maintain humidity.
The health of your animals
Whether you choose to buy Dubia roaches as feeders or take the time to breed them yourself, you care about the health of your animals. You’re going out of your way to provide what many consider to be the most nutritious feeder insect, and you expect Dubia roaches to be worth the trouble.
Reason number three to keep your Dubia roaches hydrated is that your animals ingest a higher waste:moisture ratio when they eat roaches full of uric acid and stressed out by dehydration. When that happens, they have to use their own resources to eliminate not just their own waste products, but also those of the roach they just ate. And because that roach was dehydrated, your animal now has less water to deal with waste than it otherwise would have had if the roach were adequately hydrated.
More of the good and less of the bad
But wait…there’s more: Stressed-out dehydrated feeders provide your animals with a lower ratio of nutritious stuff to bad stuff. Generally speaking, captive herps already suffer from dehydration (external link). All things equal, they need more moisture on average, not less. Ideally, you should feed your animals properly nourished and hydrated Dubia roaches.
A detailed look at hydration options
So now that you’re convinced that feeding dehydrated bugs to captive herps and other animals is a bad idea, you may be wondering about the best way to get water to your roaches. There are several good options. Water crystals are probably the most commonly used method right now. They’re definitely the most hyped. Water crystals work well, but they aren’t inevitable. We use them often, but they may not be suitable for every situation. They aren’t even right for us in every situation.
So, a little background information, then on to the watering methods.
As you may know, Dubia roaches can’t handle standing water of any depth. This is almost literally true. They’re great climbers, but they’re horrible swimmers. While there are several species of aquatic arthropods, Dubia roaches aren’t one of them. They have very simple nervous systems, and we’ve seen these poor guys succumb to what was barely a drop or two of water that they could have easily escaped if they were just willing to leave the comfort of their current location.
B. dubia originates from South and Central American rainforests in countries like Guyana and Argentina, and you would think they could handle a little water. But they can’t. If you give these drown-prone roaches a chance to drown, they will.
So how do you avoid this?
Hydration option 1: water crystals
Water crystals (or water gel) is a super-absorbent polyacrylamide hydrogel that was first discovered by the USDA around 1960. They are generally recognized as safe in the U.S.. Polyacrylamide has been shown to be non-toxic to humans, animals, and plants. However, it breaks down into several components, including acrylamide. According to the FDA, Acrylamide is especially abundant in fried foods (external link), but it is also found in roasted or baked foods – essentially those cooked at high temperatures. The FDA lists acrylamide as a potential carcinogen because it causes cancer in animals at very high doses, but they also say consumers are safe and should take no particular precautions to avoid it, beyond eating a sensible diet.
We’ll leave it to you to determine the safety of water crystals. We think they’re probably safe for consumption by our animals, given the very small amount the roaches actually ingest. When dried-out water crystals from a large colony are re-hydrated, the amount that remains looks just about exactly the same as the amount you started with.
If you want to use water crystals but have health concerns, you can use a different watering method for a week or more prior to feeding off your roaches. This increases the chance any ingested acrylamide—if this is indeed a thing—would be flushed out of the system. If you’re still concerned, read on. You can always choose another watering method.
Regarding humidity, water crystals are sufficient. They boost colony humidity, subject to the amount of heat, ventilation, and circulation in the enclosure. Water crystals tend to dry out quickly at the higher temperatures required for Dubia breeding, so it’s important to monitor them closely.
Most people assume that water crystals are highly consumable and that if you want to use them, you have to constantly buy more, but that doesn’t have to be true. All things being equal, dried-out water crystals from a roach enclosure are about the same volume as the ones you poured out of the bag. Gardeners say they can last as long as six years in the ground, where they’re used to increase soil moisture. They can be washed if necessary, rehydrated, and reused. If you do this, be careful about bacteria. They do tend to get a bit nasty, so we often throw out what remains and start fresh.
Hydration option 2: fresh fruits and vegetables
This is as it sounds. It’s giving your roaches nothing to “drink” but fresh fruits and vegetables. Some people find this surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Dubia roaches in the wild get their hydration primarily from vegetation. As opportunistic feeders, they can consume much of the plant matter they come across in the rainforest. Their “natural diet” includes moist, rotting leaves, bark, moss, and other vegetation, which at least occasionally (but probably only occasionally) also includes fruits and vegetables.
Fruits & vegetables do a good job of hydrating roaches, but they don’t do much for enclosure humidity. If there’s already enough moisture in the air, you don’t need to be concerned. However, humidity is a concern in drier parts of the U.S., or where household humidity is reduced by central heating or air conditioning. In these cases, the lack of humidity from fruit and vegetables is something to consider. Low humidity doesn’t mean you can’t feed your Dubia roaches fresh fruits and vegetables. It means you need to consider a supplemental hydration/humidifying method.
While there are significant benefits to providing fresh fruits and vegetables, there are also drawbacks. Nothing huge, but they’re worth considering. Since you’re (hopefully) providing your Dubia roach colony with a hot, moist environment, vegetables and particularly fruits will break down quickly and rot. The result is a smelly mess that is potentially dangerous if mold takes hold. Be careful to avoid mold. Dubia roaches eat rotting plant matter in the wild, but they aren’t living in hot, poorly ventilated enclosures that they can’t escape. Mold can take hold in a single day under these conditions. Consider changing out vegetation at least every two days as a general rule. Don’t go much beyond that without exercising extreme caution.
Hydration option 3: a sponge
Some roach-keepers really like sponges for watering their colonies. Sponges absorb moisture and are safe for use with roaches—poor swimmers that they are. They’re also reusable, hold a decent amount of water, and are fairly effective at raising enclosure humidity. And you don’t have to change them out every day. The downside is that they must be thoroughly cleaned regularly to prevent mold and bacteria, as well as the associated risks.
Another issue with sponges is that you must be careful about which type you use. Not all sponges are created equal.
Kitchen sponges
These are a no-no! You’re forgiven if you’ve already used one in a pinch…or for a while. We strongly suggest avoiding sponges like the ones in yellow or green packs you buy at the grocery store for a dollar. Have you ever noticed that when you unwrap a kitchen sponge, it’s dry yet soft and supple? Have you seen them suds up when you hold a new sponge under running water? That’s some unknown chemical combination, and we doubt it’s good for either roaches or your animals.
Synthetic kitchen sponges are made of polyurethane, which is a petroleum product, and we know petroleum products slow roach reproduction (external link). They also often contain chemicals like Triclosan, which is a pesticide! If you’re breeding Dubia roaches, we probably don’t need to tell you to avoid pesticides. The same goes for those using them as feeders.
If you use a “kitchen sponge”, we recommend searching for one that is chemical-free.
Sea sponges
The alternative to kitchen sponges is sea sponges. These are a good choice for roach hydration. They’re natural and safe, which is already a vast improvement over most synthetic sponges. They also hold more water than kitchen sponges, and they’re surprisingly durable. When used and cared for properly, sea sponges tend to easily outlast synthetic kitchen sponges, which degrade quickly in warm, moist, dark environments (like your Dubia roach colony). Sea sponges may also disappear over time, but not because they become moldy and unusable or because they break down. It’s more by roach attrition. Roaches will nibble away at them little by little, day after day, and they tend to slowly disappear over time.
Hydration option 4: paper towels
This method is probably borrowed from cricket-keeping. Simply fold a paper towel (or several) into the desired size, wet it with water, then set it inside the enclosure. The roaches won’t drown, and they can drink from the paper towel at will. It’s not a bad method for watering roaches. The towels hold moisture well because they have very small pores; however, the smaller surface area tends to cause sogginess and foul smells relatively quickly. They need to be changed often. In our experience, this is about every other day.
There is also an issue with potential chemicals in paper towels. They are a highly processed paper product, and some chemicals in paper and pulp processing have been identified as endocrine-disrupting. This is a bad thing if you’re a cockroach. It may be a bad thing if you’re a cockroach breeder, too.
The jury is in on paper towels for commercial use, but the verdict is still out for home use. They’re probably OK in a pinch for the home user with one Dubia colony that they maintain for personal use. They’re probably even safe to use for a while until you have a chance to work out an alternative, but out of concern for the health of the roaches and the animals they feed, we would recommend steering clear of paper towels as a long-term hydration strategy. They may not be as bad as kitchen sponges, but we know they contain chemicals. We just aren’t sure which, so we give them a thumbs-down in the long term.
Hydration option 5: a water container
This option involves two methods—one for hydration and the other for humidity only.
Hydration method
The hydration method is a moisture wick system that utilizes cotton or another absorbent material to draw water up from the base of a container, wicking it to the surface. This is a simple device, and it’s simple to make. Just find a jar with a tight-fitting lid and punch a hole in it that will be large enough to insert the wick material but not too large that it falls through or roaches can fall in. Cut the “wick” so it’s long enough to reach the bottom of the container and stick out the top. Insert the wick, fill with water, tighten the lid, and put it in the colony. It works well, but it’s not a widely used watering method – probably because it takes effort for roaches to locate the wick and reach it for a drink. But there may be some enterprising roach-keepers with clever ways of providing access for their roaches.
Humidity-only method
The humidity-only method is effective for supplementing other watering methods to achieve higher humidity in an enclosure. This is a quick & dirty method that can be used to boost overall colony humidity in a pinch. Alternatively, it can serve as the primary humidifier. To try this method, grab a mason jar, pickle jar, or small plastic storage container—whatever you prefer that has a lid—and pour some water in it. Poke some small holes in the lid. You want airflow without any roaches falling into the jar. The lid could also serve as a screen, which can be secured to the top with a rubber band, wire, or hot glue. Set the water-filled container with the affixed lid in your enclosure and voila! Instant humidifier. Place it in a hot area for increased humidity and a cooler area for decreased humidity.
We often use this method in our colonies. It’s very simple and easy, but there are a few things to keep in mind. First, it’s best to use short, wide containers rather than tall, thin ones. If it tips…sorry—when it tips—water will spill. Second, you can adjust humidity not just with the container’s placement but with its size, lid material, and hole size. The more water surface, the higher the evaporation rate, and the more open the top, the more moisture escapes. This method is intuitive, and you can experiment to find the container/lid combination that works best for your situation.
The last word on this hydration method is one of caution. Standing water (like what will exist when the jar tips over) is very bad for a colony of Dubia roaches. Take care to avoid it. If it occurs, clean it up right away.
Hydration option 6: misting
This is another humidity-only method that can be used successfully, but it requires caution. Spray bottles are an excellent way to quickly introduce a lot of moisture into the air. We used to use it occasionally to boost the humidity of an entire room, and only rarely in or on an actual colony. It’s a bit risky, and we’ve developed a more effective room-wide humidifying system for our colonies. If you do mist, spray only as much water as will completely evaporate within ten or twenty minutes, then wait at least a few hours before spraying again. You want to avoid excess moisture, as usual. This relates to the potential for mold and bacteria growth.
As an aside, most people who have kept reptiles, amphibians, or arachnids at some point know how quickly mold and mildew can appear in a warm, wet enclosure. The slippery film that signals the beginning of mold inside a terrarium or vivarium forms in just a few hours. If you ever see that happening in a Dubia colony, remove it quickly.
Hydration option 7: wet food
This is similar to supplying only fruits and vegetables, as it works well for roach hydration, but not for humidity control. Dubia roaches will never eat the amount of wet food required to raise their enclosure’s humidity. If a colony could eat that much, it would consume it so fast that it probably wouldn’t do much to boost humidity.
The downside is that wet food needs frequent changing. Sometimes, small amounts will dry out and not cause problems, but more often, they seem to stay wet, become moldy, and spoil the enclosure. It’s a good hydration method, but it requires changing every day or every other day at the longest.
Hydration option 8: luffa
Watering Dubia roaches with a luffa, like our Luffa Insect Water Dish, is safe, effective, inexpensive, and natural.
The idea is to soak a piece of luffa in a shallow water dish, similar to the sponge watering method. However, the luffa allows roaches to drink not just water that is absorbed onto the surface of the luffa, but also directly from the water itself. It’s a fairly neat system with some advantages over other methods.
The roaches don’t need to rely exclusively on absorption. This is beneficial when the water level is low and there isn’t enough to reach the outer surface of the luffa. It’s also less affected by temperature and evaporation. Depending on humidity and temperature, water can evaporate quickly from the surface of a sponge. This isn’t so much an issue with the luffa because roaches can climb down the luffa scaffolding and reach the water directly if they need to.
We use this method in our colonies. It is very effective. It’s also reasonably safe for the drowning-prone Dubia roaches. While some inevitably succumb to the water, the numbers are very few. In fact, fewer roaches die with luffa than they do from walking around on water crystals.
And a luffa is reusable. It’s sturdy and easily cleaned. It gets a bit dirty as the roaches use it, but with a quick rinse, it’s as good as new. Well almost. They do degrade over time, but it takes a while, and they’re relatively cheap and easily replaced when needed.
Conclusions
These are the various methods used to hydrate Dubia roach colonies. You may not have to think much about humidity if you’re fortunate enough to live in a humid climate. Everyone else will need to consider humidity when choosing a watering method. There are many options, but we don’t think the final decision of which to use is difficult once you know the basics. You just have to consider your situation and make the best of it.
We hope this information helps you find a hydration strategy that suits your needs and works well in your situation. Please let us know if you have any questions, and please inform us if you use a different hydration method that we haven’t covered here. We’re always open to new ideas and to adding something new to the list!
