Betta132

But that's not a definition. That's "here's when I think it started", not "here's what it is". Unless I'm misreading?

Which I guess brings us back to the question of what DO you consider the isopod hobby to be? I literally don't know how someone would define it.

The book is called "Pets in a Jar" by Seymour Simon, and I gave it away last year to a little girl interested in bugs, so I unfortunately don't have a quote. It's out of date, and among other things claims that you should be able to keep a starfish alive in a gallon jar, but the care info for most of the land animals isn't bad. Online, I found mention of "Pet Bugs" (Sally Kneidel, 1994) and "The Pillbug Project" (Robin Burnett, 1992) to add to that.

Oh, cool! Do you have any care advice for them?

Well, how do you define the isopod hobby? Did it start when someone started keeping them? Did it start when a kid first traded some of their isopods to someone else? With the first person who had multiple different kinds? If a kid goes into their yard and picks up some isopods to keep, are they an isopod hobbyist? Does it have to involve communication from others to count?

Ah, well then the abstract painting can be on your face! It's the hot new makeup trend; live and unrestrained roaches.

Oh, that's too bad. The Paratropes roaches in particular are gorgeous. Imagine a bin where you flip over a piece of bark and there's 20 of those under it! LIke some kind of weird abstract painting.

This pic was on Pinterest without a name. It came up on Google when I was looking up "rough bark roach" to show someone photos of those. What is this cutie and where can I get some?

I looked around and I couldn't find any isopods that looked like either half of him. I assume he was hiding. I'll update if I spot him again. Or if I start seeing matching babies.

You can also use a pitfall trap to try to catch roaches, though it may be harder with a climbing species. You bury a cup up to its rim in the substrate, and you put food in the bottom, but nowhere else in the enclosure. If it's for a climbing species, you'd probably want to use a deepish cup and put a ring of petroleum jelly around the inside so they can't climb back out. You'll also catch a lot of the isopods, but if it's just roaches and isopods in the bottom of the cup, you can dump them into another container and sort them. If you have the space, my suggestion would be to sift all the substrate, pull out as many of both the roaches and the isopods as you can, then put the substrate in a bucket somewhere and keep feeding like normal. Repeat another time in a couple of weeks when any remaining critters will have grown enough to be caught. If your substrate is getting mold pockets in it, you're probably keeping it too moist, and it may be too deep. Also, there's probably something fueling that mold- possibly roaches are dying in there and it's growing out of them. IME, substrate on its own doesn't tend to mold often.

OK, good to know, thanks. Right, I should have clarified- I USED to have males, so I'm wondering if these females can both still have babies. Clearly one of them did.

I knew they couldn't hybridize, I just forgot how similar they were going to look as babies. Is either species capable of giving birth with no male present? I have an adult female of each species, but no males. Those little ones are clearly a pretty fresh batch, so is it just one species that can retain sperm, or both? And another question: I know that mixed-species enclosures usually end up with one species outcompeting the other. That's going to take awhile, though, right? They're in an enclosure that's about 4 square feet, and I've had no trouble keeping them all fed thus far. Is there any reason I shouldn't just put them back together for awhile, and start pulling out individual adults when they show up?

Edit: I guess I don't have much of a way to tell them apart. I've put the adult female of each species in their own little enclosures, set inside the main enclosure to keep the temp stable. An inch of coco fiber, some oak leaves to chew and hide under, all inside half a plastic gallon jug. They can't escape, and any babies they have will be contained, but they have space and food and shelter. When I start having multiple ones mature, I'll set up separate enclosures to put the adults into. For now, I guess I just have a bin of assorted nymphs. Awhile ago, I saw that my local pet store had some death's head roaches. I went "sweet! I like those" and got a couple, and put them in my peppered roach enclosure. I didn't think they'd bother each other or anything. I forgot about how similar the nymphs are. Now I have no clue how many I have of either species. Which species are these? (I know the adult is a death's head) And I assume it's pointless trying to tell on these. Oh, and my cats would like to make it known that the sound of roughly 25 large cockroach nymphs scrambling around in half of a gallon jug is very interesting. I had to stop them from putting their little kitty feet in there and poking the roaches.

I have a particular fondness for roaches that a layperson might look at and ask "what is that?" instead of going "ew, a cockroach". Variety is the spice of life, and the variety of living things is a particularly good spice. I also like the round shapes. I know these aren't common species, but can anyone point me towards some care info on them? I'm trying to figure out something to keep in an Exo Terra 8x8x8 or 8x8x12. These three are looking like they might be possible candidates. I figure I need something fairly small, that doesn't need deep substrate (the most I can get in this is 2" without some juryrigging), that won't scatter everywhere or fly into my face when I open the tank. There's about a 1mm gap along the side edges of the door due to how it's constructed. If I really wanted to, I could silicone the door shut and just open it from the top, but I'd prefer something that can't squeeze out there. I could probably also rig something to make the substrate deeper if it was needed. I also want something that can be reliably left alone as long as it has food and moisture. For the bark roaches, it looks like they eat only apples and bark. I'd give them hardwood bark, we have pecan trees in the area. Would they eat dried apples, do you think? Not store-bought, just sliced thin and dried to jerky texture in the oven. Easier to just keep in a container next to the enclosure to feed them whenever they need it. How warm do they like to be? They look like they'd take decent advantage of climbing space, running up and down things, and might be especially visible from the sides through the glass. The pillbug roaches, I can't find much data on. Roachcrossing says they need good ventilation, moist air, and will eat apples, and I know @Hisserdude had some at one point. Does anyone have any advice on them?

It sounds like they're a bit fussier to keep than I'd prefer at the moment. I'm definitely going to put them on a list for later, though! Maybe they'll be down in price by the time I'm out of college and have more time and energy for bugs. They really are beautiful. And I have a particular fondness for roaches that the layperson wouldn't even recognize were roaches. I absolutely want them at some point! They're kinda like small versions of those bright green Madagascar pill millipedes, except not doomed to starve thanks to a lack of beneficial gut bacteria.

Well, they're easy to bait out of the substrate with food. You could probably just put food on top of a plate in their enclosure, turn out the lights, and wait for them to swarm it. I'd sugest a pitfall trap, but on second thought they climb a bit too well for that, don't they?

Oh, man, so many good suggestions! Do you ever have spares out of your colonies up for sale or trade?

I found it on Google, and the attached link is... some kind of Facebook-esque site, of a language I don't understand, with this listing long gone. These are beautiful, and I want 20. What are they? Edit: Looks like they may be Corydidarum Magnifica?

Hm, I may need to figure out what species I was mixing these up with. I could have sworn that Surinam roaches are a mostly parthenogenic species that still has functional males, and that the females are wingless. Does that sound like a species anyone has heard of, or did I just get bad information somewhere? If I keep them at cool room temps (60s), will they breed more slowly? I want to keep some of these, the parthenogenesis is neat, but I don't want to deal with a few hundred.

I don't know the species, but we had a mantis egg case show up in our Christmas tree one year. I put it in the fridge so they wouldn't hatch during the winter, then took it out in spring. A month later, all the babies emerged!

I have a little, basically empty greenhouse in my yard that doesn't really have anything in it aside from some cardboard boxes and empty planters, but it seems to have become a favorite hangout spot for two species of isopod. I happened to move a box in there and saw Porcellio isopods, which I haven't seen in a year or so, so I went after them to try and catch some for ID. And, while I was doing that, I found an orange A. vulgare! Also a vulgare with a black front half and sort of a golden-yellow back half, which I REALLY hope is genetic, because that's pretty cool. I'd love to get that as a morph and just call them "pharmacy", since that half-and-half color makes them look more like their namesake. I collected as many A. vulgare as I could see that looked even vaguely orange, though "vaguely" was the best I got for the rest. Those have gotta have the right genetics, I figure. I'm going to go out to a few different areas and look for more orange ones, too, and I'm gonna check out my greenhouse again in a couple days once they've gotten over being bothered. I also took two large (over half an inch, easy) vulgare out of my peppered roach enclosure and put them in with the other vulgare, in hopes that their size is genetic. I got their enclosures set up. Each one has a 2.5gal tank with about an inch and a half of coco fiber in the bottom. I didn't want to go deeper because I don't want it to go stagnant. Gonna try to catch some springtails outside- if you find leaf litter with enough in it, you can pick up individual bits with the springtails on it and put those in a container without worrying about what else might be living in there. They also have some hardwood leaves, and each tank has half a cuttlebone and an entire deer bone. One got a scapula, one got a rib. Tomorrow, once they've had time to calm down, I'm going to give each tank 1 piece of dry cat food. I'm going to wait for them to have babies and for the babies to get big enough to see the colors properly. Once they do, I'll set up a 5g tank and start taking out the ones that are furthest from the goal colors. The rejects of both species go into the 5g to breed as they want, and if I see any brightly colored ones in the 5g, they go into their respective 2.5g. At first, I'll only be taking out the ones with a lot of gray, so I'll still have decent numbers (hopefully) in the breeding tanks. Don't want to thin it down to just 2 or 3 orange ones in the first generation. That's the most orange one. It's a bit brighter in person, a nice burnt orange, definitely eye-catching compared to the rest. That's my half-n-half. Any idea if that's a genetic thing? You can also see that some of the others have a little orange tinge to them. These are my Porcellionides. I saw but didn't manage to catch more of the standard grayish-blue ones, but I got a few of these. They're sort of an orange-pink with areas of grayish-purple. I'm going to try to get a strain going that's a nice mix of dusk-related colors, I think. I know people have already gotten orange ones, so I'll aim for something more like the one in this photo, just a reliably producing strain. For the vulgare, I'm going to shoot for a deeper orange than I see in other orange morph pics. A lot of them seem to be the light orange, and I like deep oranges. Heck, maybe I can even get it more towards red. I'm super excited to see how this goes! And I've found more today! Another nice orange one, though a bit less intense and a bit more speckled than the other one. It was crawling around in a puddle but hadn't drowned yet. Their gills mean they can live underwater for a little while before the comparatively low oxygen in the water gets to them. I also found a handful more of the orange-tinged ones.

Ooh, I do like the glowspots. I'll have to get those when I can. I can't right now, though, because my empty space is now full. I found some orange A. vulgare isopods outside- two that are fairly bright orange, and then about 20 more with varying degrees of orange tinting. I also found a Porcellionides species with an interesting sort of dusky color instead of the usual blue. So now I have two isopod setups.

I'll be copy/pasting this to two other places, and will link them up here in case anyone wants to see any other suggestions I might get. https://www.dendroboard.com/forum/parts-construction/351136-considering-blaberus-giganteus-exhibit-need-background-advice.html#post3060760 http://arachnoboards.com/threads/cave-roach-enclosure-advice-needed-blaberus-giganteus.318477/ I have a 65 gallon aquarium standing empty except for a couple inches of water, and I think I want to make a giant cave roach habitat. But a really cool one- like the inside of a cave. I've been looking at pictures of their natural habitat, and they live in rainforest caves in Central America. I'm thinking of making a background that looks like fake rock, and providing light only from one smaller fixture, like the light is shining down through a hole in the ceiling. The substrate would be a nice, thick layer of coco fiber and hardwood leaves, and I'd put some wood in for them to chew on. My main concern is that the roaches will chew anything I use as a background. I don't want to use a cement background because it would be super heavy, and I don't want to work with clay, it's kind of a pain in large amounts. I'd thought about styrofoam with something over the top as sealant, but I'm worried the roaches would eat through the sealant and just start chewing. Who's kept these guys, and how do you keep them? Any sort of background?

Lateralis look easy to keep, but they're kind of generic. I like bugs I can show off to people. Colors and fun patterns and interesting body shapes, or "this bug clones itself", or things of the sort. I think we have Lateralis just living in the area, too.

Males are winged, females aren't. Nymphs are a lighter color and are smaller than adults. Also, with Surinams, if you have a nymph too small to sex, it's probably a female. Many introduced populations of them don't actually have any males. This one apparently does.