In a tiny house the color of salmon roe, sit racks of trays and 30-gallon barrels crawling with crickets, mealworms and mice.
A little shop of horrors to the warm- blooded of the species. A gourmet buffet to those whose blood runs cold.
This is Anchorage's Alaskan Reptile and Cricket Ranch, Dianna Smith, proprietor.
It's no picnic being a bug and rodent rancher. Smith has hundreds of thousands of worms and bugs to tend to. Plus, she just got a shipment of 748 mice, and they are some righteous breeding, eating and excreting machines. Chores keep her busy seven days a week. Filling feed troughs, cleaning pens, launching the occasional escapee roundup.
Smith wants her charges healthy and happy, even though they're destined to be lunch. No, especially because they're destined to be lunch. People's pets depend on them -- snakes, lizards, frogs and birds in particular.
Although the reptile part of her business isn't happening yet, she swears it's coming. Designer snakes, lizards and such.
"Eventually I'm going to have my own little retail," she said. "I've dreamed of this ever since I was little girl. If it kills me I'm going to have myself a reptile store."
For now, Smith is focusing on the feeder side of the business and expects to be ready to sell to the general public in a couple of months. In the meantime, she's selling mostly to the Bird Treatment and Learning Center in Anchorage and the WildBird Rehabilitation Center. During baby bird season, she goes through more than 100,000 one half to one-inch long mealworms per month. Visualize something like 350 heaping handfuls of brown, writhing worms. Or not.
Smith says she's been a "bug nut" all her life. Growing up with five brothers may have had something to do with it.
When she was 8, one of those brothers, a big one who worked in a grocery store, brought home a tarantula that had stowed away in a banana box. He set it loose on the kitchen floor, then sent Smith on a mission into the kitchen. She flipped on the light and there it was, all big and hairy.
She could have shrieked, which would have delighted her brother. She was not about to give him the satisfaction.
"Oh, what a BIG spider," she hollered.
She ended up keeping it as a pet.
"That was it," she said. "I was hooked."
Reptiles soon followed.
Her current pet lineup goes like this: Two American bull dog/pitbull mixes, a bearded dragon, a fire skink, a leopard gecko, two corn snakes, a king snake, three anoles, three fire belly toads and two tree frogs.
They eat well.
The front room at the ranch has three large mouse racks, with six mice per tray and 54 trays per rack, the empty ones ready for babies. A side room, which she keeps between 82 and 84 degrees, is for containers of wiggly mealworms in various life stages of growth -- egg, worm, pupa, beetle. In a huddle of plastic garbage cans are the crickets, big, small, hopping about as if on pogo sticks, their chirping reminiscent of a warm summer night in the country.
The soundtrack in the front room isn't as quaint.
"The squeaking you're hearing is probably mating," Smith says. "The males are very sexually aggressive. As soon as they get up in the morning you'll hear them eating and then that's it. It's time for the girls."
If things go according to plan, Smith should have nearly 4,000 "pinkies" in a couple of weeks. Bring them on. She's ready.
Smith sells her feeder mice fresh or frozen. Pinkies, peachies, fuzzies, hoppers, weanlings and adults, large or small. The frozen are pre-whacked.
"I use CO2," she said, "and I have a (plastic) box. What I do is put them in there, close it and then I gas them. It's pretty quick. They don't know what hit them."
Contact the Alaska Reptile & Cricket Ranch: alaskareptile2004(at)yahoo.com
E-mail Debra McKinney at dmckinney(at)adn.com
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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