Maximum Nutrition Everyday Roach Ration

Product Details

This is our Dubia roach chow, and it’s where the magic happens! This is the good stuff…where the rubber meets the road. It serves as the foundation of our Dubia roaches’ diet, and we consider it the cornerstone of our Dubia production.

We call it Maximum Nutrition Everyday Roach Ration (MNERR for short), and we designed it to do two things:

1. Maximize Dubia roach growth and reproduction, and
2. create nutritious feeders.

We accomplished this in two ways.

First, we thoroughly researched, tested, and refined the ingredients over many roach generations.

While this may sound simple, it’s actually quite complex. There is a large body of research on insect rearing, and most of it focuses on diet and nutrition. Cockroaches are forgiving insects, but they present certain challenges. When it comes to productivity, nutrition matters. Getting their diet right versus wrong can mean the difference between a successful breeding project and an unsuccessful one.

We run a productive Dubia roach breeding operation thanks in large part to this roach chow. But it wasn’t always this way. There have been many ups and downs. In the scientific literature, a 100% difference in productivity in roaches fed different diets is common. This is huge! And these were not “garbage” versus “ideal” diets. Instead, they were comparisons between two or more diets scientists reasonably expected to succeed.

The lesson is that when rearing insects, you must get nutrition right. Under-nourished Dubia roaches grow slower and produce smaller batches of less viable offspring. And because adult Dubia roaches depend on nutritional reserves acquired as nymphs, poor nutrition at any stage of development can cause a multi-generational cycle that’s hard to break.

In fact, research suggests cockroaches don’t ever recover from early life nutritional deficiency. Once deficiency exists in nymphs, they never catch up to their healthier peers. What they lost is gone forever, and they don’t even recover if they receive full nutrition later on.

And what about adults? It’s the same thing. Once roaches reach adulthood, their health and future productivity is essentially set. What they will become as breeders or feeders is a function of what they are, and at this point that won’t change.

Yikes! This is a strong argument for the power of nutrition. And for never neglecting your roaches! If you do, they may end up irreversibly unhealthy and unproductive. They may also live shorter lives.

We’ve seen these highs and lows in our own colonies during early testing. For us, the evidence is clear: Nutrition matters. This is why we developed MNERR, and why we use it in production. Our breeding operation depends on high productivity. And we get the production we want from our roaches, thanks in large part to this Dubia roach chow.

Second, Dubia roaches have specific nutritional needs at different life stages. These needs vary by stage, but they also vary within stages. The roaches manage these needs with dietary “self-selection”. This means they choose to eat foods with the nutrients they need, when they need them.

Self-selection is a well-documented trait (external link) in Dubia roaches. MNERR takes advantage of this innate ability.

Our Dubia roach chow addresses all these issues and more. Based on our research, it has the right amount of protein. It has all the nutrients Dubia roaches need, and it has them in the right amounts. And also in the forms they can use.

In short, our Dubia roach chow helps grow healthier, more productive Dubia roaches.