BlattaAnglicana

Yes that looks like a small prolapse to me. I've had this happen to four of my roaches (hissers) - always female and always related to giving birth. In two cases the prolapse was quite large and looked ruptured and the females died soon after (within a day or two). In two other cases the prolapse was small and not ruptured, and the females both lived - the prolapse shrivelled up and either fell off or was "reabsorbed" by the female (not sure which - I left both in the colony in the hope that they would survive, and did not see them for a few days, and when I saw them next the prolapse had disappeared). One female is still alive after about 8 months, and the other died of old age a few weeks ago. The good news is that the prolapse in your photos above looks more like my two females that survived, it does not look like the prolapse is ruptured and it is quite small, so you may be lucky and she might well survive and reabsorb it. I would say leave her alone and check on her in a few days to see if it has disappeared. The only thing about my two females that survived is that I don't think either could carry an ootheca to term afterwards - I saw them both aborting oothecae several times afterwards and in one case her oothecae were always misshapen, which I assume was a result of some non-fatal internal damage from the prolapse, so you may find that if she survives she won't be able to breed afterwards. Hopefully you have other females in the colony though?

As you have two males they might be running around to establish a dominance hierarchy and the female is just "in the way". I had this when I bought 4 G. portentosa (2 males and 2 females) a few months ago - for the first month or so the males were running all over the tank chasing each other until one established dominance and since then it has been a lot quieter. The dominant male and the 2 females now tend to hang out together on a piece of cork bark most of the time, and the other male sits on his own at the other end of the tank. So it might be that the female is just getting caught up in the males' fight for dominance? Are there plenty of places for the female to hide if she is being chased/harassed? i.e. cork bark or egg flats that she can hide under if the males are running around or chasing her? In my case with the G. portentosa the females were able to hide under an egg flat and in a toilet roll tube whilst the males were chasing each other but now there is a definite hierarchy and less fighting they come out more often, so perhaps just giving your female more places to hide will help.

If she has only recently moulted perhaps she is just not ready to mate yet? It's possible she may just need a bit of time before she becomes receptive to the male after her final moult, so maybe in a day or two she won't be so defensive with him? I certainly find with my female stick insects that they usually don't mate straight after their final moult even if adult males are around (in some cases it's taken a couple of weeks after their final moult before both males and females take any interest in the opposite sex!) so perhaps roaches are similar?

I have three Hisser species with cork bark in their enclosure (G. oblongonota, G. portentosa and E. javanica) and all seem to be doing fine. I've had the oblongonota nearly a year, the javanica 8 months and the portentosa 4 months with no ill effects, though I do sterilise the bark (pour on boiling water to soak for a few minutes then microwave for at least 2 minutes) before I put it in their cages. They are definitely eating it (very slowly!) as I see them doing so occasionally and the holes and crevices all get bigger over time as they chew it away, though a small piece will still last several years at the rate mine are going! The javanica and oblongonota have both had several broods of young (which also eat the cork bark) and most of those have got to adulthood (the ones that didn't were probably not healthy individuals anyway) or are growing well, so I am pretty sure cork bark is completely safe for roaches. I can't speak for other insect orders / groups though.

Do you keep them on a damp substrate? I did that with mine at first and got huge problems with mould. After a while I let the substrate dry out completely and now keep the humidity up instead by spraying the cage for a few seconds twice daily (I bought an automatic mister recently so I didn't have to keep doing it by hand!). A light spray doesn't allow the substrate to get permanently wet and I have noticed a lot less mould as a result (mostly only on soft food such as fruit which I haven't removed quickly enough!) and they don't seem to have had any problems so far being kept dry. So if you're keeping them quite damp it might be worth letting the substrate dry a bit so you can leave them alone for longer?

How long have you had them? I noticed when I first had my hissers (initially a male and two females then three more females after one of the original females died) that they didn't move around much - after an initial day or so "exploring" their cage they tended to stay hidden under their log for long periods especially during the day. This went on for several weeks after I got each group. They are generally more active at night anyway but I wondered whether they perhaps were a bit stressed with moving to a new "home" and therefore stayed hidden as some sort of survival response. Once they had got a bit more used to their surroundings I noticed they all became more active and now they move around quite a lot even during the day. The colony is also now much bigger as the females started to give birth and as roaches are semi-social perhaps also being in a bigger group makes them less stressed and therefore more likely to come out of hiding? So if you haven't had them long maybe they aren't moving much because they are still getting used to their new surroundings?

The ones I have seen all seem to have been caused by giving live birth (these were hissers not Dubia though - not sure if that is significant). They were all female and all had the prolapse immediately after giving birth, I believe as a direct consequence of it. Two were really bad cases and the female died within a couple of days, but another female had a very small prolapse (significantly I think there was no sign of the 'tubes' described by the OP in this case which I believe means her gut and internal organs were not significantly damaged) and that one seems to have fully recovered, but now seems unable to make a viable ootheca and hold it to term. I don't know whether the births were premature and caused by stress, though I would doubt it at least in one case as the second fatal prolapse occurred several months after I'd got this female and she had settled in with the others and was eating well, and didn't seem distressed in any way. Whether some other damage or injury had occurred to these females in transit (I got all of them as adults, they were not born in my colony) I don't know and as yet I have not had any births from my new adult females who were born and matured in my colony, so I can't really pinpoint the reason. It's possible my original females were just old and therefore more likely to suffer a prolapse anyway.

I've sometimes seen roaches clinging to the underside of logs and hides for ages looking as if they were resting on their backs, especially if the hide isn't very tall and they can touch their legs and their backs on both surfaces - I don't know whether they sleep like that (or even if they truly sleep at all in the sense we would recognise) but I would not be too worried by it unless she shows any signs of distressed behaviour, and it doesn't sound as if she is. However as others have said roaches are semi-social and don't do as well when isolated so I would definitively recommend getting a couple more roaches (if you don't want babies then ideally female nymphs / subadults that are too young to have bred) to keep her company :-)

Thanks Hisserdude yes I was thinking I would probably need to start reducing the numbers soon, before this new generation starts to produce too many babies! The good news is that the UK breeder I mentioned has said they are willing to take my excess stock so it looks like I will be able to reduce the colony size without killing any of them myself - whilst I am sure others have far less qualms about it than me I am very squeamish about the whole idea of using my pet hissers as feeders, especially the bit about choosing which individuals get to live and which ones die, so it will be good to be able to pass them onto someone else - hopefully they will breed from most of them rather than feed them off, although of course I do realise I won't have any control over what happens to them afterwards so I can't be 100% certain. However the alternative (having my house completely taken over by roaches!!!) is probably more of a issue than the small guilt trip I will have knowing that the person I've passed them onto might have less qualms than me about feeding them off!

Anyone?

Hi all, quick question, how many hissers (Gromphadorhina species, probably oblongonota but may be hybrids) can a tank 45x45x30cm (c. 18x18x12in) hold? I now have about 50 hissers, about 3/4 of which are adults and the remainder large nymphs. They seem fine in there at the moment, they have plenty of hiding places, and I have seen no major signs of aggression or fighting amongst the males as yet (a bit of hissing but no antenna biting or other physical attacks on each other), but obviously as these ones breed the tank will become more crowded and either I will need to get a bigger one or (more likely) I'll need to thin out the colony. I am hoping to be able to trade them or give them away to some people in an insect group I belong to, probably about 10 at a time, or there is a breeder here in the UK who says they will take excess breeding stock of most inverts, although I have not yet contacted them about these! Should I be thinking of thinning them out now (there is an insect group meeting next week I can take some to) or can/should I wait until this generation has babies in case anything happens to the colony (sudden disease/unexplained deaths etc.)?

Do you mean bugnation.co.uk? Or another (US based?) BugNation site? If it's the UK one, I can get to the forum web site (http://www.bugnation.co.uk) and there have been people posting on there recently (including today), although I don't think it's a very well used forum as the posts don't often get answered and are quite few and far between. So if you mean "dead" in the sense of unused then maybe that's true, but the web site is certainly still there.

I think you said your hissers were males? If so I don't think this is anything to be too worried about - male hissers fight a lot and often clip each others' antennae short as part of the fight. I have a couple of Elliptorhina javanica males which now have little more than stubs for antennae, as they are always fighting, and they seem otherwise to be perfectly healthy - it doesn't seem to stop them feeding or otherwise getting around OK so I think your hisser will be perfectly fine. Not sure why they do this, I read somewhere it could be that rival males clip the antennae of their "opponents" to stop them smelling out a female so effectively, but I don't know if that's true or not!

Quick update now I'm back - the hissers ate absolutely every morsel of what I gave them (including three large whole carrots and what I thought was plenty of lettuce leaves in water, oats and cat food) so clearly I should have left them more than I did! I hadn't realised quite how much a colony of about 50 hissers, about 75% adults by now, could eat in six days I did lose a couple of nymphs whilst I was away unfortunately - I don't know whether it was anything to do with not leaving them enough food, or whether it was because it has been particularly hot (30 degrees Celsius plus - very unusual for this time of year) in the UK whilst I was away, or whether it was just "one of those things" and they would have died anyway even if I had not been away and had been feeding them properly. However the rest of them all looked healthy and active on the day I got back (if hungry - they hoovered up a couple of pesto jar lids full of oats and half a banana in one night after I fed them when I got back!) and so far I have not had any other losses, so I am hopeful that having no food for a day or two hasn't had any lasting effect. The javanica are all doing fine including the tiny nymphs - as far as I can tell (I haven't been able to count them definitively as they are so tiny and hide away in the smallest cracks in the cork bark) they have all survived and I have seen a couple of them successfully go through their first moult too since I returned, which I hope is a good sign. So there were no problems with leaving them at all, and they had enough food, but that colony is much smaller (18 adults and probably about 10-12 babies) so they don't seem to eat anything near as much. The best thing is my automatic misting system (Mistking) is working absolutely brilliantly - it is one of the more expensive systems out there but I can say now it is worth every penny. You do need to experiment with the spraying intervals and timings over a week or two to get the amount of humidity right, but once I'd worked out a routine I found it keeps their cages nicely humid without being so damp that mould becomes a problem. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone going away for more than a couple of days and it really takes the worry out of humidity control in their cages for me in the future. The intention was to use it just for holidays but in fact I think I will probably just keep it running from now on to save me the bother of having to hand mist every day Thankfully I'm not going to be away that long again for a while although I have a couple of long weekends coming up, and this time I'll be sure to leave the hissers a lot more food than I did before!

I don't sterilise the coco coir if I've bought it from a pet shop or online reptile/invert store as I expect it to be sterile anyway - it's generally stuff I don't know the provenance of I sterilise first, i.e. stuff brought in from the local park and cork bark that has been hanging about in a vendor's box for goodness knows how long! I do wash other decorations like bowls and plastic plants before I put them in, but don't microwave them. Personally I would wash the gravel too, especially if it's covered in dust.

It basically kills off any fungi, bacteria or other things that might cause disease or mould in the cage. You need to do it for several minutes which is why things should be soaked first as it will then be less likely to dry out and catch fire.

I feed mine organic food so I can be sure the risk of pesticides is lower (though not completely zero, contrary to popular belief!), but I also peel anything that has a rind (apple, pear, carrot, courgette etc.) and give any other fresh food that I can't peel (lettuce, broccoli, etc.) a good wash before I put it in the tank anyway. FWIW my staple dry food is organic porridge oats plus premium cat treats (the only thing I give them that isn't organic - organic dry cat food seems hard to come by in the UK), for other protein I sometimes feed them beans (haricot, cannellini and chick peas), and for fruit/veg they usually get a mixture of apple, banana (their favourite!), orange (without peel), broccoli, lettuce, sweetcorn, baby peas and carrot depending on what I have spare in the fridge! I do try to remove anything that is going off before it gets mouldy as I don't believe it's good for them to have mould in the cage. I also sterilise anything "natural" like cork bark (which they will eat) or oak leaves that I put in the cage by soaking in boiling water then microwaving for a few minutes (be sure to keep an eye on it, if things like wood or bark start to dry out they can catch fire!) before letting them cool and putting them in the cage. I have had a few losses over the 8-9 months I've had them, but I'm pretty sure none of them was to do with the food I give them, and my colony is now growing so hopefully I've been doing something right!

Thanks Hisserdude - I guess that's probably true, given the problems and complications I know live birth can cause. The two I had die from prolapse after giving birth certainly show it can cause them a lot of physical damage, so I guess even if the birth is successful it must take a lot out of them. There still must be some evolutionary advantage to it otherwise live birth surely would never have evolved if the risks to the female outweighed the advantages by too much. I assume it must be the much higher likelihood of the eggs hatching successfully when incubated inside the female vs predation or other loss in an external ootheca? Anyway, I isolated this female overnight in case she had something contagious and although she is still alive this morning she is very weak, so sadly I will be putting her in the freezer today At least in some consolation she gave birth to two small litters of about 8 nymphs each in my care, and I think most of them have survived to adulthood, so at least I have some of her offspring in my (growing!) colony. She was certainly the biggest of my original females, so I would not be surprised if the huge male I posted a photo of the other day was her offspring!

Update, it seems her head is now completely paralysed - before her antennae were moving and she could move her head around but now she can't seem to be able to move either Her breathing is very laboured and I think she is probably not far from death. For that reason I think I will have to put her in the freezer If she'd shown any sign of recovery or movement in her paralysed mouth parts, so she might be able to feed, i would have taken a chance and left her, but at the moment she just seems to be getting worse. It's very hard for me having to put down one of the first hissers I got, and it's surprised me how attached I've become to a little insect over six months, so it's a sad day for me I don't know what caused it and it seems to have come on quite quickly - I first noticed she was missing a palp on Saturday evening, though I hadn't seen her for a while so it could have been like that a while, but although her other palp seemed paralysed then she was able to move her other mouth parts and drink at that point and was otherwise behaving OK. It was yesterday when she stopped being able even to drink and today when her whole head has become immobile. None of the others in the colony are showing any similar symptoms thankfully, so I am hoping that whatever the problem is, is not infectious. Perhaps it was just old age after all?

Looking for some advice here. One of my original female hissers that I got back in November seems very sick, she seems to have almost like a paralysis of her mouth parts (I've tried to feed her water and orange juice from a paintbrush but see no response at all, her palps and jaws simply don't/can't move - she is missing one of her longer palps but I don't think that is the problem have seen others eating perfectly well with just one) and although she is able to move around she keeps twitching and arching her abdomen as if she is in discomfort. I didn't think she was that old (I got her when adult so I don't know how old she is, but she is not missing any tarsi and doesn't otherwise look or act old, i.e. slowing down etc., though her antennae are a bit shortened) so I don't think it's simply old age. Has anyone seen anything like this before? Any idea what might have caused it? Do you think there's any chance she will recover or is it hopeless? I'm going away soon so don't want to leave her suffering (I am not sure whether they suffer in the same way as vertebrates, but she does not look comfortable or contented and clearly cannot eat as she is currently) so if it's a hopeless case, sadly it may be kinder to put her in the freezer before I go than leave her What do people think? Any advice?

Thanks all for the suggestions, I will try leaving carrots in each cage although I'm not too hopeful they will eat it, as they have always ignored carrots when I've fed them those before. Having said that if there's no other choice I suspect they will eat it - they are roaches after all! I also think I'll leave lettuce - it does go limp after a few days if they don't eat it but I've noticed that it doesn't seem to mould in my cages and both colonies love it and will eat it even if it's a bit limp. I've also seen the baby javanica eating lettuce so at least I know they will have something they like at least for the first two or three days. I might try putting the stems of the lettuce leaves in a bowl of water stuffed with cotton wool to try to keep it fresher a bit longer, with the added advantage that the roaches can drink from it if they want to as well. Still worried about leaving my "babies" for this length of time though!

HI all, just wondering what people do / what advice you have for feeding a colony of roaches when away? It will be for six days and there won't be anyone else I can ask to feed them, so I need to make sure they have enough food for that time. I'm definitely going to leave them a larger bowl of oats and cat food so the dry food should be covered but I don't want to leave them with no fruit or veg at all during the six days either. What food is recommended (i.e. that won't go off in six days if it's not eaten) and what do others do? I have 2 colonies now, Gromphadorhina (sold as hybrids but look like oblongonota to me), about 50 individuals, all adults and large nymphs, and Elliptorhina javanica, 18 adults and about 10 really tiny nymphs about 2 weeks old (I did get those females I was looking for!) which are the ones I'm most worried about. Can tiny nymphs like that survive on dry food without fruit and veg for a week, or do they need it? Also will they start to turn on each other (especially the little ones, and the javanica seem to fight a lot more than the oblongonota!) and cannibalise each other if there isn't enough food? They should be OK for humidity as I've bought an automatic misting system that sprays them twice a day for 20 seconds or so and I've been running it for the last couple of weeks and it's keeping the humidity at around 60-70% (in several cages), without any mould showing up, but should I also leave out more water for them as well? The sprayer is directed slightly towards one of the tank walls so there are droplets of water on it after it has been sprayed but I've not really seen them drink from it (not that I've seen them drink from a water bowl either!).

Well it's taken a while but finally I have a photo of one of the biggest males in my colony - there are lots of adults now and one or two absolutely enormous males! This is one of them: Edited to add - these were sold to me as Gromphadorhina "species" (i.e. unknown provenance, may be hybrid) but they look more like pure oblongonota to me, from the photos I've seen of portentosa and oblongonota on here and on the web. However I'm not an expert so if anyone could tell me if he looks like "pure" oblongonota or whether he's probably a hybrid, that would be great!

My hissers turned their antennae up at dried dog kibble and wouldn't touch it (I bought a huge box of it too, what a waste as I don't even have a dog!) but absolutely love cat treats (dried but slightly moist 'biscuits') and can't get enough of them. I must admit I haven't tried a different brand of dog food (the one I bought was the "value" dog kibble from my local supermarket so maybe my hissers just have very discerning taste!) but in my experience so far, cat food is definitely preferred.

Thanks Skyvie, yes he seems pretty happy so far! Still not been able to get photos as he tends to come out of hiding only at night and I don't really like disturbing the colony too much during the day, so I haven't had a good opportunity yet. He's still the only adult male in the cage but there are now at least two more that have moulted to adulthood and they are all females. No sign of mating yet though - whether that's just because I haven't "caught them in the act" or whether it's because the females take a bit of time before they become receptive, I don't know (I read somewhere that newly moulted adult female roaches in some species need a few days to a few weeks before they are ready to mate - can anyone confirm if this is true for hissers?) but I imagine there will be even more babies in there before long There is also one absolutely huge subadult male in the colony - I think he will be even bigger than the first male as he is about the same size already as the new adult male. It will be interesting to see those two fight it out when this nymph finally makes it to adulthood!