Jelly Pots for Reptiles and Invertebrates

Peel the plastic lid off, press the pot down into the substrate until the rim sits level with the surface, and walk away. That is the entire method. There is no dish to fill, nothing to tip over when an animal climbs onto the edge, and no standing water for small isopods or juvenile roaches to drown in. The gel stays where you put it, holds its moisture for days rather than hours, and when it is spent you lift the empty cup out and the enclosure is clean again.

Each pot holds around 16 grams of fortified vegetarian fruit gel, sealed under a peel-off plastic lid and ready to use straight from the packaging. The base comes from plant-derived gelling agents, with protein added and fruit flavouring on top. These come in from a supplier and we bag them here.

They suit anything that will take a soft sweet food at ground level. Isopods, millipedes, cockroaches and adult beetles are the main users here, and for beetles in particular a pot can carry most of the adult diet. Crested geckos take them as a supplement alongside their main powdered food, sat in a holder on a branch instead of sunk into the floor. Be ready for the response to vary. Some colonies find a pot within the hour and strip it; other species, and often individual animals within a species, walk past it for a week and never touch it. It is worth trying one before building a routine around them.

Treat them as a supplement rather than a staple. Isopods and millipedes still need hardwood leaf litter and rotting wood as the foundation of what they eat, with protein on top of that from something like dried silkworm pupae, and roach colonies do better on a gel such as Repashy Bug Burger as the regular feed with jelly filling in around it. What a pot does well is moisture and a little sugar without daily attention, which makes it useful for feeder colonies and for the week somebody else is looking after your animals.

In a warm humid enclosure the gel will grow mould before it dries out, so lift out anything uneaten after a couple of days instead of leaving the cup in to spoil. Unopened pots keep well stored cool, dry and out of direct sunlight, and once the lid is off, use that pot within a few days. They are formulated for animal feeding and are not for human consumption, so keep them away from children. The rest of what we stock for feeding sits in our accessories collection.