My New Prionotheca coronata Adults!

Well, I recently got my hands on a breeding group of 4 adult Prionotheca coronata, and I am SO stoked! These are the most impressive darkling beetles I have ever seen, not only are they HUGE and quite heavy, but their morphology is just so rad with their spikey elytra, and heavy pubescence! This is not my first time working with this species, but this IS my first time seeing adults in person! And hopefully with said adults I can produce a lot more larvae to work with than the few I had last time (and I'd like to think my skills in rearing psammophiles, including Pimeliinids has been honed in a lot better over the past several years).

I have the adults in a well ventilated bin with a couple inches of fine sand substrate, with a teeny bit of crushed leaf litter mixed in. I'm keeping a quarter of the sand moist, the rest dry, and am feeding them freshly dead roaches and dog food (they'll eat both, but do seem to prefer the dead roaches). I'm keeping them at around 80-85F°.

For a while I was getting worried I only had males, since I've seen mounting behavior several times, but no oviposition, but last week I found an egg on top of the substrate! Quite a large egg too, around 5 mms, and looks quite soft and fragile. So I very gently scooped it and some of the surrounding substrate into a separate deli cup, where it will hopefully incubate and hatch within a week or two.

So exciting, hopefully there will be many more eggs where this is from! In addition to being at risk from being trampled by adults, the larvae of this species are quite cannibalistic, so I'll be looking for and removing any and all eggs as I find them, to hatch and rear the larvae separately to improve survival rates.

Anyways, that does it for this post, I'll be sure to keep you updated on these amazing beetles! Thanks for reading, hope y'all enjoyed, and I'll catch you folks next time! 😉