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Look, while I'm not saying the local hub employees were right, if I associated someone with the experience of dealing with 500 cockroaches I might not be able to really mask my contempt either 🤢

Are you farming the cockroaches for protein/milking them or something? I can't fathom any other reason why anyone would want cockroaches other that these weird cases I read about on some science magazine.

Edit: just remembered they can be used as food for pets.

I'm disappointed to hear that that about Josh's Frogs. I'm a fan of the company overall and had great experience with them, but I have never bought live food or live animals from them. So, I'm a little surprised to hear that they're shipping roaches and crickets this way. Otherwise, they're my go to for a lot of other hobby related stuff, so I hope they have made some improvements on that front.

For clarity, I imagine that the species of roach you ordered were likely something like dubias.

For anybody that might see this, most of the roach species used as feeders (or even kept as "pets") are not associated with diseases in humans and would be highly unlikely to become an infestation issue in most domestic situations outside of fully tropical climates (and even then it would be unlikely). These are critters that need stable, warm temperatures and fairly high humidity, as well as appropriate food sources and surprisingly clean environments just to keep them alive in cultivation. Your home or the post office (in North America) is unlikely to be conducive.

Having a hard time blaming the post office workers here lol

Fucking amazing. I'm howling

She could probably release a few bigger crickets and they would clean up the little guys for her. Yeah yeah something about an old lady and a fly.

Maybe some big green grasshoppers so they're easy to find once the job is done.

Live bugs are always stored in a bag, bottle, or other sensible container. Not directly in the shipping box.

"Gardening" is the answer to the implied "why" :)

A clear plastic container

A netted rectangular prism inside a box?

Not alive for one

Of all the critters that people feed live "bugs" (i.e "bugs") to, snakes are one of the least likely.

Food items like live crickets are usually fed to animals like lizards (probably most common example), frogs and other amphibians, fish, birds, predatory invertebrates (like spiders and scorpions), etc.

In the case of pinhead crickets, those are usually purchased (in large quantities) by people breeding insect eating species since the young are too small for anything larger than the youngest and tiniest food items or for people with a large collection of animals like poison dart frogs that need very small, fairly fragile food items.

As for the debate of local pick-up versus online orders, there are pros and cons to each, and different people have different situations and needs. At the end of the day, in my part of the world, pretty much all the places I'd go to pick up crickets locally are just getting them shipped in from large scale cricket breeders anyway, so if you need a bulk order of 1000+, it's likely cheaper and easier just to order them online and have them shipped. Also important to note, these aren't just random crickets someone collected in their back yard, these are a specific cultivated species that's been grown in relatively sanitary conditions so that they aren't carrying harmful parasites and disease or covered in dangerous pesticides and chemicals.

We did it at a wildlife rehab center I worked at. If we bought local we would clean out the local bug supply in a couple days. Which happened a couple times when we couldn't get them online or a package got lost.

Not that I think that's what this is. The packaging could be better, but also you order a box of crickets you get a box of crickets....

I think that would constitute as terrorism. Cause if it doesn't legally, I'm retaliating like it is.

I’m a fan of live ladybugs for pranks. You can buy 1500 ladybugs for like $9. They’re intended for garden pest control. They come with some wet food inside the container, (which provides both food and water for them) so they can live in the container for a day or two after being delivered. And their instinct when you open the container is to fly away, because they naturally want to spread out and get away from where they hatched.

Quietly pop that lid open during a housewarming party, and they’ll be finding ladybugs everywhere for weeks. At most, they’re a minor annoyance. So it’s not explicitly harmful or destructive like some of the other options. If anything, they’ll actually help control more harmful pests.