FYI, as of right now, any stocks labeled "Hemiblabera brunneri" in the hobby are just mislabeled Hemiblabera tenebricosa, there's only a single source stock of Hemiblabera in the hobby, but the US and EU decided to agree to disagree on the identification for many years... After captive individuals were sent to the taxonomist Dominic Evangelista though, who confirmed that they were indeed H.tenebricosa, most big breeders and those "in the know" in Europe have switched over to using that name. So to reiterate, as of August 2020, there are NO Hemiblabera brunneri in culture, just mislabeled H.tenebricosa.
OK, now that that's out of the way, let's get to the main topic... Hemiblabera brunneri. There are few images of this species online, and the only ones I can find of museum specimens actually ID'd as H.brunneri are from the CSF and a somewhat recent paper about the roaches of the Virgin Islands. However, the two locales look a little different to me...
To show you what I mean, here are images of the two specimens displayed on the CSF, (both non-types BTW), from the Bahamas:
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| H.brunneri, non-type adult male. ©CSF |
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| H.brunneri, non-type adult female. ©CSF |
And now here's an image from that paper, (Ecology and Diversity of Cockroaches from the Virgin Islands), of an adult male and large nymph H.brunneri, from Guana Island and Little Thatch Island respectively, (also non-types):
See the difference between the adults of the two localities? The abdominal coloration is completely different, with somewhat striking red markings on the male specimen from Guana Island, (though one can see some faded markings on the abdomen of the Bahama male, which may have been reddish at one point), and the white pronotum bordering on that specimen is also brighter, wider and straighter than the duller, thinner, more curvy pronotum margins of the Bahama adults.
Now coloration can vary from locale to locale, so that alone might not mean these are two different species, however, the tegmina on the Bahama male are definitely rounded, while the Guana Island male has quadrate tegmina... So that lends a little more weight to the theory that they're two different species, both identified as H.brunneri.
Question is, which one's actually brunneri? Unfortunately, I have no idea, as I can't find the description paper for this species... However, Roth does mention in his paper "Cockroaches From Guana Island, British West
Indies" that the bright yellow pronotum margins are characteristic of this species:
The material specimen he had to work with was from Gorda Island, which is pretty close to Guana Island, so I'm pretty sure the individuals from Guana Island and probably the rest of the Virgin Islands with the red abdominal segments and thick, bright pronotum margins are truly H.brunneri...
Weirdly though, according to the Virgin Islands paper, there is apparently a wingless adult form of brunneri documented from Guana Island... So if that's true, and this species can be that dimorphic, having both brachyapterous and wingless adults found next to each other on the same island, perhaps the specimens on the CSF from the Bahamas, despite having different shaped wings and different coloration, are indeed H.brunneri? 🤔
So yeah, to sum this post up, I'm confused. 😂 Still not 100% sure if the roaches shown on the CSF and the one in that paper are both brunneri, or if only one is. They definitely look different though, so that alone is worth noting, if only to myself and my limited audience here... TBH most of these taxonomy posts here are intended for me to look back on in case I need to in the future, helps to have a reference of what my trains of thought were on the taxonomy of certain species, since my head can get quite muddled at times. 😅
Anyways that's it for this post, thanks for tuning in, see ya!
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