Virus silences cricket farm in Leesburg

This isn't exactly about herps but herp food. I guess it's OK to post. Sounds like a bad thing especially if you're a cricket.

Jumpin' Jiminy! Virus silences cricket farm in Leesburg
By Stephen Hudak
The Orlando Sentinel

Updated: 10:41 a.m. Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Posted: 9:19 a.m. Tuesday, June 22, 2010


LEESBURG - Healthy and hopping a year ago, Beth Payne's insect-growing operation is so quiet now that you could hear a cricket chirping - if she had any.

Payne, owner of Lucky Lure Cricket Farm, supplied reptile owners, Florida theme parks and zoos with millions of singing insects every month until her Leesburg warehouse was suddenly silenced by a bug of a different kind.

A quick-spreading virus, blamed for destroying similar farms in Europe, wiped out her cricket colonies this year, contaminated her facility and forced the 58-year-old niche business into bankruptcy court this month.

"At first, we thought it was just a bad hatch," said Payne, 53, who scooped 9 million dead crickets from incubation bins in February.

Lucky Lure, considered the state's oldest commercial insect farm, was ravaged by a plague that has cricket farmers justifiably worried, said Drion Boucias, a professor of entomology at University of Florida.

"There's no known cure for this," Boucias said of the aggressive, species-specific virus, which has caused a nationwide shortage of crickets, commonly sold for a dime a bug at pet stores and slightly cheaper over the Internet.

The densovirus attacks the common house cricket, a fish bait and tasty staple for pet lizards and other reptiles, who prefer a live meal with a little spring in its step.

Boucias said the virus, spread by contact and ingestion, is next to impossible to remove.

Cleaning for naught

Payne, who consulted the professor, tried unsuccessfully four times to restart the bug-growing operation, investing thousands of dollars in chemicals and specialized equipment to sterilize floors, walls and fixtures.

"We bleached and bleached and bleached," she said.

Eight people lost their jobs when Lucky Lure, saddled with more than $450,000 in debts, shut its doors in May, forcing a swarm of reptile hobbyists who relied on Payne's crunchy crickets to scramble for pet food.

Experts say there is no evidence that any animal has been harmed by eating an infected cricket.

Payne, who suspects the virus arrived on a tainted shipment of worms from a California farm, tried to keep her business crawling by selling crickets raised by other farms.

She rang up $22,000 in bills for bugs from the Armstrong Cricket Farm in Georgia, the nation's oldest and largest cricket farm. Armstrong manager Jeff Armstrong is so concerned about the virus that he won't accept mail from other farms, fearing the microscopic, contagious bug might have hitched a ride on the envelope.

Several growers and dealers have posted notices on their websites, including Clay Ghann, president of Ghann's Cricket Farm, a family-owned operation that was featured this year on Discovery Channel's Dirty Jobs series.

Georgia-based Ghann's supplies the inch-long critters to former Lucky Lure customers, including the Central Florida Zoo and Botanical Gardens in Sanford. Bearded dragons, poison dart frogs and tarantulas are among two dozen zoo animals that feast on crickets, said Shonna Green, the zoo's marketing director.

Lucky Lure, which also supplied crickets to Disney's Animal Kingdom, Busch Gardens and SeaWorld, began as a bait service in Lake County in the 1950s, serving anglers looking for a low-cost lure to snag largemouth bass and crappie.

Eerily silent

Payne, a mail carrier for nearly 30 years, married into the unusual occupation.

Her late husband, Robert Payne, who died in 2008 at age 45, wanted to buy a bait shop in the late 1980s when he moved to Florida from California, where he had worked on movie cameras in Hollywood. He settled for a cricket farm.

After they married in 2002, the couple decided to set up sales booths at "Repticons," annual conventions of reptile owners. The strategy proved to be a boon for Lucky Lure, said John Legan, 35, the bug farm's foreman.

Lucky Lure, which had been shipping about 50 boxes of crickets a week, began selling more than 2,000 boxes a week to reptile hobbyists across the U.S., prompting an investment in a new climate-controlled building.

A box of 1,000 crickets cost $10.50 to $21, depending on the number of boxes ordered.

The farm shipped 32 million crickets in just six months in 2009 and was poised for 2010 to be its most profitable year ever, Legan said.

He recalled how the winged hordes thundered inside their growing bins, sounding at times like a heavy rain. Beth Payne likened the ferocious noise inside the farm buildings to the pounding of stampeding horses.

But now it's quiet.

"I think if I heard one now, I'd cry," she said.

Cricket virus

What: The densovirus is a single-strand virus that affects only insects - in this case only the house cricket, which is commercially grown in the U.S. as a fish bait and reptile food.

How spread: Likely by ingestion of contaminated material by healthy crickets or deposited on cricket eggs by infected females. Infected crickets die without visible symptoms.

Why occurring: "We're still learning about it," said G.B. Edwards with the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/st...rg-761659.html

That is terrible.

And the risk to the other farms from even a visit or piece of mail..sigh... it's just terrible.

Something tells me that is not the last company we are going to hear about this happening to. My guess there are a few still trying to clean and re-sell what they are purchasing form other companies or for one company I know of they are purchasing eggs and attempting to raise them up. I guess buying eggs is cheaper then buying crickets themselves so it would make some sense but only if they are not just bringing "clean bugs" - or in this case clean eggs, into an unclean facility since it seems that "cleaning" is not stopping this virus. Doing this may slow the spread of this virus but it sounds like this is going to have to be contained sometime soon or it will hit everyone. Identifying a way to stop this virus sounds like the best bet at avoiding the cost of feeding our critters being more expensive then feeding ourselves.

Something is going on My old criclet supplier stopped shiping crickets out and haven't been for weeks know!? top hat crickets!

TopHat has also been affectedb by the virus, they are down now and attempting the seemingly impossible job of cleaning and restarting
I wish them luck, if it can't be dealt with by Tophat (who are taking EXTREME measures), us lizard lovers have problems.

I use to always buy from Lucky Lure, they'd actually come all the way down here to local shows, there's no one Good doing crickets anymore, not in the mass quantity they use to.
Then after lucky got knocked out Ghanns get bought out, and they're still recovering, so its still a pain to find crickets. I gave up and turned to roaches. :-\

Same here I had to

I'm surprised some of the cricket farmers haven't switched over to mealworms or dubias the moment they knew they had the problem. Not as good for fish bait, but most of their sales are to the pet trade anyhow. With a little PR, I bet they could have pet stores stocking dubias wherever they are legal.

Would Dubias be a good replacement for the farmers? Females crix are very prolific, they lay eggs in peatmoss or similar substrate, are taken and incubated, and the insects growth is rate very uniform making them ideal for mass production of various sizes. Little or no sorting is required.
I hear their are some "exotic" crickets that are imune to the virus, but they are not nearly as prolific. This has been a problem in Europe for many years (since 02' I believe), and unfortunately I do not think they have found a viable option for the common brown house cricket ..

Lucky Lure did worms, Idk if they did them in house though. Anyone in Fl would still be out of luck, you can't have dubia here.