Betta132

I can't photograph them right today. I'll try again tomorrow when the sun is back out, but the orange is kinda faint and doesn't want to show up on camera. They're more of a grey-orange than a bright orange, but they're more orange than most, so I figure they're a good starting point! It just doesn't show up very well under the lightbulbs we use indoors, so I have to wait for sunlight. Gonna try to hunt down some brighter orange ones later. I might go back to where I found this batch and see if the people at the closest house are home. I tried ringing their doorbell today, but they weren't home, so I couldn't ask if I could go check out their backyard for bugs. I don't think the average person would mind someone coming into their backyard to flip a few rocks, and it does help with this sort of thing that I look like I'm 15. We're also going to visit a family friend who lives on a decent chunk of land that has lots of woodland, so I'm going to take a look under the leaf litter there.

They're really cool, but they need a decent chunk of space, right? I'd prefer something small, so I don't have to set up too big of an enclosure. I don't have much spare room at this point. I do want B. giganteus at some point, but only when I can really go all out. Big enclosure, faux rock cave-type background, that sort of thing. Rat skeleton or two.

I flipped a rock on a whim to look for orange isopods, and not only did I find a reasonably orange one, I found two Surinam roaches! I dug around in the leaves nearby, and found a few more orange-tinged isopods, plus some roach nymphs, but I couldn't catch the nymphs. Isopods have this convenient habit of curling up when you uncover them, but roach nymphs don't tend to do that. I got a male, too! I put them in an empty M&M jar for now, with a handful of coco fiber, some dry leaves, a couple wadded-up coffee filters for added texture, and some dried apple. I'll put a couple inches of coco fiber in there as soon as I can get some. I figure they aren't gonna need much room until they have a batch or two of babies.

I'm looking for a new roach species to keep. I have dominoes and peppered roaches, plus a couple of death's head males in with the peppereds. What I'm looking for is a species that: Doesn't tend to be good at escaping (can't climb glass, can't or at least doesn't tend to fly straight upward) I could keep a decent colony of in a 2.5 or 5 gallon aquarium Will breed and behave normally in low 70-high 60 temps (my room is cold and I don't want to have yet another thing plugged in to keep them warm) Can basically be ignored aside from putting some food in once a week I have a backyard full of pecan leaves, so have easy access to hardwood leaves. We have cats, so I have cat food on hand. I also eat apples pretty frequently, and my bugs get the cores. Does anyone have any suggestions? I love the gyna species, but they're all far too escape-prone. I especially like wider or rounder roaches. The burrowing species are charming, but hard to watch- I'd prefer a species that's a little more surface-active, or at least can generally be found hiding under bark at the surface instead of being buried. I kinda like Arizona sand roaches. How does one keep those?

I've only had vulgare identified. I don't remember seeing any others in the area? We have what I think are powder blue isopods, also. They're called "sowbugs" locally, and are a lot less common. Flat, relatively soft-bodied, bluish-grey isopods that can't roll up and have a pair of antennae-like appendages on their hind end. They run a lot faster than the Armadillidium. I haven't seen any in awhile or I'd post some pictures. I did look up isopod sightings in my area on an app called INaturalist, which I suggest checking out. All the sightings (and I looked at something like a hundred) were either A. vulgare or the sowbugs.

And they're definitely not from terribly different populations. I brought some in from outside a year or so ago, those bred in a terrarium, and then I moved a piece of that terrarium's hardscape into my domino roach enclosure. From there, some got into my peppered roach pen. They're all descended from something like 50 individuals, if not fewer.

I strongly suspect people have been keeping isopods for decades. It's certainly gotten more common more recently, but I don't think people liking them is anything new. There's probably always been a few oddballs in any given population who like to keep bugs. People have certainly been keeping jars of pillbugs for longer than 14 years. I had a book somewhere about keeping pets in jars that was published in, I checked, 1979, and it has an entry on pillbugs.

I have A. vulgare in two separate roach enclosures. In my domino roach enclosure, the biggest I see are maybe 1cm long. This is about what I see in the wild populations around here in Texas, too. One that's 1cm long is pretty big compared to the rest. In my peppered roach pen, though, I've got a few that are hitting 2cm. I didn't even know until now that they GOT that big. My best guess is, it's down to moisture. I'm in Texas, and it's not terribly moist here. I'm keeping my domino roach enclosure relatively dry, too, with just some damp patches. My peppered roach enclosure, though, is moist everywhere. I only have the three samples, though. Anyone else have A. vulgare? If so, how damp do you keep them, and how big do your biggest ones get?

I have a few smoky browns in my domino enclosure, and they get up and start feeding their antennae through the cracks around the lid when they smell certain foods. Mostly they like bacon, sausage, and fresh biscuits.

Dubia nymphs look a lot like tesselata nymphs. You aren't the only one who's had this mixup happen, I met a lady who'd recently gotten a number of tesselata nymphs (which I can verify the species of, they were mostly huge and I've since had the two I got from her morph into adults) and she had some dubia adults starting to morph out of the group. I suspect dubias are a relatively common contaminant for roach sellers and are hard to weed out.

Ooh, seconded, I've never seen Phortioeca phoraspoides before now but I definitely want some. I love the difference between the nymphs and the adults!

I get those in my yard sometimes. Found them on corn plants a couple of times, in shrubs, never on the ground. Accidentally caught one in a sweep net. Go with the sweep net, along the sides of a cornfield if you can, see what pops out. They seem to mimic fireflies, probably due to fireflies' noxious contents, so look where fireflies can be found resting. To see what lives in a rotting log with minimal disturbance, turn the log over, pull a couple pieces of bark off, then put it back the way it was.

As of nearly a year later, I have lots. I put a simple pitfall trap made of a plastic cup in the tank with some food, and I took out easily a hundred adults. They haven't gone ridiculously out of control, but I thought it would be good to thin them out a bit. They're eating the leaves that I put in my for my domino roaches, is the only reason.

Sarracenia pitchers eventually die if they become clogged with insects, but the plant stays healthy and regrows pitchers, and it gains more energy from the insects than it loses by having a pitcher die. They're made to deal with occasional swarms of insects coming through.

Carnivorous plants need to be kept in peat or sphagnum and given rainwater or distilled water, they can't stand minerals. They also mostly need very bright lights. Sundews and pinguicula love gnats, but only catch the gnats that stray out and bump them. Speaking from experience, they don't have enough catching power to wipe out an infestation, though I do have a pinguicula on a living wall that keeps the very low gnat population from ever increasing. Not good gnat control, but neat plants.

I love the pantanals! Do they do much of anything, or just sit there looking nice?

I had a peat substrate kill off some roaches, not sure what happened. It retains more moisture than you really want for roaches, also. It's OK for amphibians, but coco fiber is better as a substrate, and also better for the environment- peat is dug out of old bogs and takes a long time to renew, while coco fiber comes from coconut shells and is a byproduct of everything that uses coconut interiors.

That's definitely good to know. Aside from the sealant issue, how do you find it? Is it a good size and shape to work with? I've been eyeing them, they look like a really nice size.

I feel like the way to settle this would be to have everyone who has adults of one species or the other measure them, either in millimeters or in weight, and post the sizes.

Some people try to remove stuck sheds on every animal species that sheds. With a few very specific exceptions, it's a bad idea, but the intent is good. In that case, I'd say you need to mist more.

Keeping the humidity up should help him, but that's about all you can do. Definitely don't try to pull anything off him, just leave him alone.

Those are pretty durable, they should be OK. Just have some food and water ready for them when they arrive.

Our house is really old and has no insulation in the walls, all sorts of bugs come into the walls for winter. My guess is a couple of eggcases ended up in there from adult roaches, plus a few others found their way in. Maybe they smelled the food in there and wanted in? At any rate, most of them are out now, and I can hopefully catch the rest when I renovate the enclosure. I just can't believe there were so many in the goat skull. They weren't the only ones, either, that's where my peppered roach adult hangs out. And he's several square inches of occupied space on his own!

If they were packed well, they have a chance, especially if the seller sent them with some snack food. What species are they?

Alright, I'll forego the sand. I can probably get a more scrubby/desert look without sand anyway. There aren't very many domino roaches right now, so I think I'll let them multiply further before I try to introduce anything else. When I do, I think I'll try a handful of herbivorous darklings, they seem like a good bet.