My New Carabus nemoralis!

Last week, as I was out looking for bugs next to a recently drained riverbed, just a couple minutes from my house, I found a sexed pair of the European Carabus nemoralis! 😃 I've actually caught and kept a pair of this species before, from much further north in Idaho (before I had even started blogging), I had no idea they would range this far south in ID.

Unfortunately I wasn't able to breed them back then, but I wasn't exactly trying my best, nor did I have the best of knowledge when it came to breeding Carabids, (admittedly I still don't, I find Carabids quite tricky to breed consistently), so here's hoping this attempt will go a little better! Honestly, if I can rear a single captive produced larva to adulthood, I'll be happy. 😅

The male has bronze colored elytra, and a clear purple sheen to his pronotum. The female has a slight bronze-ish sheen to her elytra, as well as a slight purple sheen to her pronotum, but she is definitely less metallic and colorful overall and appears black except in bright light (this is not the case with the male). The male also has enlarged tarsal pads on his two front legs, whereas the female doesn't. This coupled with the fact that he's thinner and a bit shorter than the female made sexing them easy.

Anyways, I've got mine set up in a moderately ventilated gallon container with almost two inches of moist substrate, which is a mix of coconut fiber and old Gyna capucina substrate (which I've been re-using for a lot of my beetles), and some small bark pieces for hides. 

However, the coconut fiber was from my old Mantis religiosa enclosure (yes, I released her and the two ooths she laid not too long ago, to make room for more long term acquisitions), and apparently had some grain mites in it, which then all seemed to attach themselves to my Carabus pair... 😑 A blunder on my part, but I've tossed in springtails and predatory mites to the enclosure, so the grain mites should be gone soon. 

I also threw in some Trichorhina tomentosa (dwarf white isopods), because isopods and/or isopod frass seem to help get certain Carabidae females to oviposit for whatever reason...

For food I'm using pre-killed Eleodes obscura sulcipennis larvae, which they seem to eat no problem.

I've got them set up in an area where they are exposed to daylight, so that they will experience a somewhat proper photoperiod, as changes in the photoperiod likely help let them know when to oviposit, and I suspect the female will start doing so in the Spring. I will also be keeping them in the low 60s all winter, so they'll experience a temperature spike when Spring comes as well, (seasonal changes are very important for breeding a lot of Carabids). 

Here are some pictures of the lovely (temporarily grain mite covered 🙃) pair:

Male

Female

Very pretty beetles, and a decent size too, hopefully I can get some larvae from them come Spring! 😁

Anyways, that's gonna do it for today, thanks for reading, I hope everyone enjoyed, stay safe, if you're in the USA please VOTE, and I'll see you all in the next post! 😉

Mantis Ooths & A Gyna Epiphany

My Mantis religiosa female is doing quite well, and has laid two oothecae for me! 😁 Now, I'm not equipped to deal with mantid hatchlings yet, and TBH I don't have much interest in rearing this species myself, so all ooths laid by this female will be put outside where I found her. Which is just as well, considering I'm pretty sure these ooths need a diapause to hatch properly, could be wrong. 

Anyways, here are a couple pictures of one of them:

As you can see, a mantis oothecae is a weird, foamy looking structure, that conceals the eggs within. I'm pretty sure they hatch out alongside that white seam in the middle, usually a few dozen at a time, though numbers very between oothecae and species. 

Definitely an interesting thing to observe, I wonder how many this female will lay before passing away. 

---

Also, figured out why my Gyna capucina colony crashed...

Remember the female from my last post about this species? Unfortunately, I found her dead in the enclosure a little over a week ago... 😭 However, her death was not in vain, as it was seeing her body that made me realize what is going on with my colony... 

She must have died within a couple hours of me checking their bin, as her exoskeleton was still soft, but she had been completely hollowed out by her tankmates. I was wondering how and why they could have cleaned her out so fast, when there was still food in their bowls, when it hit me like a truck, THE BOWLS... 

Since the day I first started keeping this species, I've always given them their grain based foods in bowls, and put the fruits directly on the substrate, but, back in late June, there was a big oribatid mite infestation, they were swarming food that touched the substrate, so I sterilized the substrate and started putting the fruit in little food bowls too. Now, they've always eaten more fruits than proteins, which I assumed was just due to preference... but I actually think that this species just CAN'T FIND FOOD IN BOWLS, and ever since I started offering all their food in bowls a month ago, they've just been starving and EATING EACH OTHER... 🙃 That's why my colony has crashed, and why there weren't any bodies, which I thought was unusual considering when my nymphs died off due to overcrowding or other issues, their tankmates rarely consumed their entire bodies. 

Lately they've just been eating the pieces of fruits that some of the larger nymphs drag into the substrate, and I've been wondering why they weren't eating that much compared to normal... It's because the nymphs can't find food in bowls. As for why my recently matured adult female died, I'm not sure, the hungry nymphs may have pestered her to death and ate her, or maybe she was stressed from having escaped her enclosure for an hour or so a couple days beforehand, (which was due to me stupidly leaving their enclosure open after doing maintenance, something I've never done in my 5 years of breeding roaches).

But now that I think I know why my colony crashed, I'm hoping I can save them. There are still several subadult females in there, and my subadult males are all doing OK, so fingers crossed I can get some females fertilized and get them to give birth, now that I'm not starving my colony to death... So weird, the other Gyna species I've kept in the past never had this issue. 

Anyways, that's gonna do it for today, thanks for reading, hope you all found the information useful, I do try to be as transparent as possible with my failures and successes on this blog, as mistakes as simple as giving your roaches a food bowl can sometimes be a life or death situation... Stay safe, have a great day, and I'll see you all in the next post! 😉

My New Praying Mantis!

Well, it happened, I got my first pet praying mantis! 😄 An adult female Mantis religiosa! This species is the OG, standard mantis species, introduced from Europe, and honestly not a species I ever thought I'd be keeping. But when I found this girl and brought her home for pictures, I fell in love with her disposition and intelligence for an invertebrate... So I kept her. 😅 I found this female underneath a piece of wood on the ground, where she had just finished laying an ootheca.

Mantids are similar to roaches in many aspects, they share a lot of morphological features, they lay their eggs in oothecae, and used to be the the same group as Blattodea. There's even a whole family of mantids known as "bark mantids" that are flattened and very similar in appearance and behavior as some bark dwelling roaches. 
Unlike most roaches though, mantids are predatory, and they are good predators at that! The one thing I like least about the predatory inverts I've kept is they all seem to have crappy eyesight, and hunt by feeling their prey. Sometimes they take forever to size them up, and don't like the feel of certain prey item types... But mantids are visual predators with excellent eyesight, and feeding this female has been exceptionally easy and fun to watch, she isn't too picky about prey shape or type either, so long as it moves, she's interested. 

I have her set up in a gallon jar with some sticks for her to perch on, though she spends a lot of time up on the lid, which I hot glued some cork tile pieces to, so she can grip it better. The jar is well ventilated, and there is a thin layer of coconut fiber at the bottom, which I'm keeping humid. I'm feeding her mostly Eleodes spp. larvae, which she eats with ease. 

Here are some pictures of her:

Such a cool invertebrate, keeping her has reinforced my wishes to keep one or two of the rarer, exotic genera in the hobby, hopefully I'll be able to bring these hopes into fruition within the next year or so...
As for this female, I'll probably keep her until she passes away, and likely will put any oothecae she lays outside, as I'm not quite set up to care for baby mantids at the moment, and besides, I think the oothecae of this species require a diapause to hatch, so kind of annoying. 

Anyways, that's gonna do it for this post, thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed, stay safe, and I'll see you all next time! 😉