Rosie's New Clothes, & Other Misc Updates

Well well well, after YEARS of relative inactivity and sparse feeding behavior, Rosie, my female Grammostola porteri has molted! (on the 18th to be exact) 😁 Been quite a while since she molted, always nice to see her in her new skin, as she is always exceptionally pretty and shiny after a recent molt!

Here are some pictures of her in her new clothes!

Here's to many more years of Rosie being my best pet rock LOL, it's crazy that I've had her for over a decade now! She was one of my first invert pets, and my first exotic pet invert. 😊 Glad she's still going strong!

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Unfortunately, the smallest and youngest of my Lucihormetica grossei females randomly aborted her ootheca the other day, and I've no idea why... 😕 The other two females are doing fine, and my large female looks about ready to burst. The nymphs birthed by the medium sized female are all L2 now and seem to be thriving, so that's good at least. 😅

Hopefully my big female gives birth to a huge brood soon, and fingers crossed my smallest female produces another ooth soon. Wish I knew why she aborted, my husbandry hasn't changed at all lately, and like I said, the others are all doing fine. 🤷

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Last but not least, I have some good news and bad news regarding my Tomocerus minor, "Giant silver springtails".

Good news? They're breeding well, and even ignoring the predatory mites that found their way into their enclosure, so they seem pretty dang hardy! 😁

Bad news? Because I wanted to ensure other springtails (mainly my cotton springtails) wouldn't get into their enclosure and outcompete them, I put their tall, 32 oz container with only lid and upper side ventilation in a corner of my current bug closet, away from almost all my other inverts. The unfortunate bit is, there was one more container in that corner, directly UNDER my Tomocerus, that were isolated from the rest of my collection because of their pest potential... My jar of Sinella curviseta, AKA "Satan Springtails" (a term coined by my buddy Brandon Maines 😂), which only has minimal lid ventilation.

Well, SOMEHOW those pesky Sinella found their way into my Tomocerus container, and are already breeding in there too... So now I must go through the painstaking process of moving as many of the Tomocerus out of there without bringing ANY Sinella along with them, and I have to set up a new, clean culture of them. 🙃 So that's fun...

Oh well, lesson learned, and at least it seems like these Tomocerus will be relatively easy to culture! 😃

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

More Micro Corydioids!

Magnificent Beasts Package Series Pt. 3/6

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I plan on acquiring a certain bark mantis species sometime next year from Brandon, and in order to feed their young, I'll need tiny feeders. I did get some Sinella curviseta springtails (yuck) in this package, which will be good for little mantis hatchlings, but as they molt they'll need small, but more substantial prey. Compsodes schwarzi roaches fill just that category, and so Brandon sent me a bunch of them to get a colony started ASAP!

I've kept these tiny US native Corydiids before, so they won't get too much fanfare, but I decided to get some pictures of them anyways, because why not? 

Short winged adult male and subadult male

Subadult male

Adult male

Adult female

Neat little species, hopefully they get to the baby-making pronto! 🤞

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Now for a species I've never kept before, since I'm apparently on a micro Corydioid kick! 😂 These are even smaller than Compsodes, and may in fact be the smallest roach currently in culture (in the US at least), the diminutive Nocticola sp. "Malaysia"! 😁 These tiny roaches are in a different family than Compsodes and Myrmecoblatta, while those are in the family Corydiidae, Nocticola are in the family Nocticolidae, but both families are in the superfamily Corydioidea. Adult females of this species lack wings, can't climb smooth surfaces well. I don't know about males, as I don't think any of the adults I received are males. 

I've got my group set up in a small, minimally ventilated enclosure with a substrate of coconut fiber, with bark chips mixed in. There is long fibered sphagnum moss strewn on top for cover, as well as some cork tile hides. I'm keeping them humid, and at around 70-75F°. I'll be offering them chick feed and maybe the occasional piece of fruit for food. 

Here are some pictures of adult females and some oothecae, they are super tiny and thus were pretty hard to photograph, but I think I got some OK shots:

Adult females

Adult female carrying ootheca

Ootheca

A very cool little species that I'm glad to see is becoming well established in the US hobby, I love these micro Corydioids and hope to see more enter culture! 😁

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

Invertebrate Photoshoot!

I decided to take some pictures of some random roaches and isopods today with my little Olympus digital camera, which takes pretty nice macro pictures, but only in very bright light, (like sunlight). Here they are! 🙂

First off, we have one of my Arenivaga sp. "Algodones Dunes" females, I finally got some half decent pictures this time, at least, better than most of the other pictures I've taken of this species!

Sadly, my attempts at finding a new source for this species have failed, so I think these girls will die without mating. 🙁 Funnily enough, one of them laid an ooth the other day, it's infertile, so it won't hatch, (unless they happen to be able to resort to parthenogenesis when isolated from males, though I guess that's what happened to the Polyphaga saussurei in the hobby...).

It's a neat looking ooth for sure, and doesn't look exactly like the other Arenivaga ooths I've seen thus far.

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Next, I took some pictures of my largest Porcellio bolivari male. All of my males are still doing very well, and I have housed a couple male P.silvestrii and my remaining P.ornatus "South" females with them, all of which seem to coexist without any problems.

Close-up of a couple Sinella curviseta from the second pic

Looks like I'll be trading with Alan Grosse again for some more females, so that's great, hopefully I'll be successful in breeding them the second time around!

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I also took some pictures of a few Compsodes schwarzi, which is a species I've rarely photographed, (and almost all the pictures I took of them were a bit too saturated IMO). My colony is doing very well, I've got several dozen nymphs now, and some of them have been maturing recently, so even more are on the way!

Nymphs

Subadult male

Adult female

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Next up we got a few pictures of some Oniscus asellus "Mardi Gras Dalmatian"! My colony has exploded over the winter, I've got so many now! 😊

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Lastly, I got a few pictures of my Dorylaea orini nymphs. As usual, these were a pain to photograph, these few pictures were the best I could get.

This species has been doing very for me, all my nymphs are growing pretty quickly! Hopefully by the end of spring I'll have adults! 😁

Anyway, that's gonna do it for today folks, I hope you all enjoyed this post, will see you next time! 😉